The Coming Public Education Crisis
A fiscal calamity awaits public schools once pandemic-related federal assistance ends.
Justin H. Vassallo Spring 2023A teacher interacts with students virtually in an empty classroom at Hazelwood Ele[1]mentary School in January 2022 in Louisville, Kentucky. (Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
Of all the social inequities that the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted in the United States, the crisis of public education is among the most intractable. Reports of staffing shortages and declining enrollment—twin problems especially acute for poorer districts contending with slashed budgets and meager classroom resources—have persisted even after the introduction of vaccines for children. With most state funding tied to student enrollment, shrinking attendance means smaller budgets to meet fixed operating costs and fewer funds to attract and retain talented educators. A fiscal calamity awaits public schools once pandemic-related federal assistance ends in September 2024.
Left unaddressed, the crisis portends the return of the “K-shaped” economic recovery—in which the well-off see strong gains and those already struggling experience more instability and income loss—that economists warned about in the early days of the pandemic. The actions of congressional Democrats and other party officials have been discouraging. In late 2021, House Democrats abandoned a proposed $100 billion for modernizing school infrastructure during negotiations over President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. (The subsequent Inflation Reduction Act did not include meaningful provisions for education.) Absent a political reckoning that extends federal funding to restore programs and classroom resources to pre-pandemic levels, let alone make significant improvements, schools could face a new round of disenrollment at a moment when they are already struggling to recover the approximately 1.4 million pupils who withdrew during the first year of the pandemic.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-coming-public-education-crisis/
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