Internal competition
The analysis also found that ESSER spending created a staffing conundrum within school districts: In some cases, emergency funds were spent at higher rates in a district's wealthier schools, despite needs. of additional staff in the highest poverty schools.
Roza says district leaders whom researchers interviewed about the problem reported that staff vacancies were typically filled first in schools with lower poverty rates, sometimes with district employees seeking to transfer from schools with higher poverty levels. high.
That exacerbated staffing problems at higher-poverty schools, which were then left trying to fill newly created ESSER-funded jobs and replace staff who moved across the district.
“Let's say San Diego said, 'I'm going to put a reading coach, a nurse, or a parent coordinator in every school,'” Roza says. “Immediately those positions were filled first in the wealthiest schools. We see this all the time when teachers migrate to less-poor schools, so they may have actually created another vacancy in their high-poverty school.”
Without looking back
When it came to contracts for services like tutoring or educational technology funded by ESSER, Roza says she and her fellow researchers found that school districts frequently renewed those contracts the following year without even reviewing whether they were worth the money.
According to the analysis, that was one of a litany of ways in which contracted services were operating ineffectively.
“Let's say you have a restaurant or something. If they're going to spend money on a vendor's product, they're going to make sure they're getting value out of it,” Roza says, “or they're going to reduce it, because it's important to their bottom line. “The market is not working as well in the public education space.”
Roza says there is no one to blame in the system. An example of how money could be wasted through a contract, he offers, would be when a math coordinator requests a program for teachers who end up not using it much. But then the coordinator leaves his position for a promotion or a job outside the district, and his replacement renews the unused program without investigating whether it is necessary; It was simply part of the budget he inherited.
“(Districts) got all this new money, and some of them actually spent more money on vendors that have good products across the board,” Roza says. “But they don't necessarily buy the best products, get what they need, get the most out of what they bought, or even check to see if it worked. We hear this even from suppliers who are frustrated with this.”
Reading results
Edunomics Lab's analysis found that when it came to improving reading scores, identifying more students with reading disabilities did not always lead to an improvement in their reading ability.
Where did the investment in reading pay off? Roza says districts were most successful when they first improved reading instruction for general education students—that is, through instruction that is based on the science of reading. When a student immersed in that type of reading instruction is identified as needing special education services, Roza explains, they will already have a solid foundation on which to continue building.
“Fewer of them will be referred to special education for reading problems,” Roza says, “because having that kind of good basic instruction from the beginning really helped them.”
Broken budget process
Similar to the problems with contract work, the analysis found that school districts tended to continue spending ESSER funds on programs for several years without reviewing their results.
Part of the problem is that the district's budget cycles require them to finalize next year's budgets before getting the previous year's standardized test results, leaving little to no room to adjust spending based on student performance. .
In one case, Roza says, a district leader reported having to finalize a budget an entire year in advance, locking him into expenses that may or may not be ideal for students' needs.
“In the first full year that American Rescue Plan pandemic relief funds were available, districts spent only 14 percent of the grant funds, largely because those monies were held up in the budget cycles of the districts that did not leave room for a more agile and urgent response. ”, according to the analysis.
Ultimately, Roza says that while data averages help researchers describe the relationship between ESSER spending and student outcomes, that doesn't mean the average reflects the reality of each school district. There are big differences between districts, he says, and some of them buck the trends.
“People still want to say 'the average district,' and the average includes districts that have done great and some that haven't,” Roza warns, “so it's no good trying to apply our average findings to each individual district.”
