The competition for labor has never been more intense. Employers have more job openings than ever before, and there are fewer potential employees to fill those roles. The unemployment rate is near pre-pandemic lows, and there are few working-age adults who are not already employed.

These labor problems are hitting schools particularly hard. Even flush with a surge of federal dollars, districts simply can’t hire as many people as they would like to.

The supply of new teachers is also down significantly. Depending on the data source, there are 20 to 30 percent fewer people going into teaching each year than there were a decade ago. Those numbers are not likely to rebound quickly.

What caused the decline in teacher-preparation enrollments and completions? Until we diagnose the problem accurately, we won’t be able to devise solutions to fix it. To that end, I offer a few theories below and attempt to unpack how much truth there is behind each one.

What does the data say?

Whichever theories we have for the decline in teacher-preparation completions, they need to fit the facts. We know that teacher-preparation enrollments and completions are down, but by how much, and when did the declines start?

As Dan Goldhaber and Kris Holden describe in a 2020 CALDER brief, there are two main data sources used to understand the supply of new teachers: Title II reports and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

Title II reports are collections from states and the U.S. Department of Education that capture the number of people enrolling in teacher-preparation programs and earning teaching certificates. This data includes traditional preparation programs at colleges and universities, as well as alternative preparation programs, which may or may not be housed at colleges and universities. The Title II data only go back to the early 2000s, though, and cannot be disaggregated by gender or level of degree awarded.

In contrast, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System tracks the number of people completing college degrees by level and by major. Annual data goes back to 1960, and it can be broken down by type of degree and by gender. There are some people who earn college degrees in education but do not pursue teacher licenses (let alone new ones), however, and there are some people who earn teaching licenses outside of colleges and universities.

Still, the patterns across the two data sources look remarkably similar. Here’s a graph from the Goldhaber and Holden brief showing the number of completers according to data from Title II (in blue) and from IPEDS (in red).

 

 

The Goldhaber and Holden piece came out in 2020, and we now have a bit more data and nuance to add to the story.

First, both Title II and IPEDS data were starting to show a slight uptick in the years leading up to the pandemic. The gains weren’t large, but they did reverse a multiyear trend, and any explanation for the decline in the supply of teachers must take this into account.

Second, the Title II data shows that all of the decline in the supply of new teachers came from traditional preparation programs at colleges and universities. From 2013 to 2019, the number of individuals who completed traditional preparation programs fell by 29 percent, while it rose by 18 percent for alternative-route programs, which tend to be shorter and cheaper (See Table S1.4 here.) Traditional programs still prepare about 3.5 times as many new teachers as alternative-route programs, but any theory attempting to explain the broader decline in the supply of new teachers has to explain the differences across program type.

Third, the demographic composition of those pursuing a career in teaching has changed over time. The profession has become even more dominated by women. Additionally, while fewer people are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in education, we now confer about twice as many doctorates in education per year as we did two decades ago. This is at least suggestive evidence that there are fewer people who want to try teaching but more people who are dedicated enough to stay and reach the highest levels of the profession. That distinction is important when we get to theories for the decline in new candidates.

Fourth, we’ve had declines in the supply of new teachers before. We actually had a much larger one in the 1970s and 80s. The graph below shows the long-term trend in education degrees from the IPEDS data.  Bachelor’s degrees in education are represented in blue. They reached a peak in 1973 and have never returned to that high.

Master’s degrees in education are represented in orange. This data can’t disentangle who is choosing to pursue a master’s to improve their skills or earn higher pay from who is essentially required to earn a master’s degrees in order to enter or remain in the profession. But we do know that, over time, states have built up more requirements for who can enter and remain in the teaching force, pushing a much higher percentage of incoming teachers to earn master’s degrees. As we’ll see later, higher barriers to entry can have a meaningful effect on the number of people who choose to enter the teaching profession.

 

 

The most recent downtrend in the 2010s looks almost mild in comparison to what happened in the 1970s and 80s. Starting in 1974, the number of people completing a degree in education fell by 46 percent. After 14 straight years of declines, we had 140,000 fewer people earning education degrees in 1987 than we did in the peak year of 1973.

Contrast that earlier decline with the 19 percent dip we saw more recently. We experienced seven straight years of declines, with 57,000 fewer education degrees awarded in 2018 than were awarded in 2011.

This pattern is what I’m concerned about today. Why did it happen? What caused it, and what would get the numbers back up?

Note that we’re talking about national totals here, but that’s not how the teacher-labor market works in practice. Districts don’t need to hire a generic teacher; they need to hire individual candidates with specific licenses to fill particular roles. Even in today’s tight labor market, district leaders report having a much harder time filling special education and STEM positions than they do filling elementary or social studies positions.

Some people may be inclined to guess as to what’s happened to the supply of new teachers since the pandemic. On one hand, it’s possible fewer people went into teaching because they didn’t like the transition to virtual learning or didn’t feel comfortable in schools. But it’s also possible more people entered teaching thanks to states’ temporarily waiving or permanently reducing their licensure requirements. We don’t know yet. For now, all of our objective data ends with a slight uptick in 2020, so our theories need to fit this fact pattern.

Theory #1: Covid-related changes have made teaching less enjoyable.

Theory #2: Book bans, the fight over CRT, and culture wars have made teaching more political.

I’m going to take these two together and declare them FALSE. Simply put, they don’t fit the fact pattern described above. The decline in teacher preparation occurred before we had even heard about the novel coronavirus we now know as Covid-19.

The culture war issues can’t explain the biggest declines from 2013 to 2015 or the slight uptick in our most recent data (2018–2020). They also don’t fit with the discrepancy between traditional and alternative-route programs. It’s plausible these issues could exacerbate an already tight labor market going forward, but we don’t have good evidence either way on that yet.

Theory #3: Respect for teachers has declined, which reduced the supply of potential candidates.

This is a hard concept to define, but I’m going to rate this one as FALSE as well. The main data point used to back this claim is what used to be known as the MetLife survey and is now the Merrimack College Teacher Survey. While it does show a decline in teacher satisfaction, the survey questions have changed over time, making it impossible to make long-term comparisons.

Meanwhile, Gallup’s annual rating of the honesty and ethics across professions continue to show teachers as one of the more-respected occupations. According to their poll results, respect for grade-school teachers was steady from 2010 to 2017 before hitting an all-time high in 2020. It did take a slight dip in 2021, driven by a notable downturn in positive ratings among self-identified Republicans, but none of that fits with the trajectory in the supply of new teachers.

Theory #4: Starting salaries are too low to attract new teachers.

As recent data from the National Education Association show, teachers’ starting salaries really did lose ground to inflation from 2011 to 2018, and they were starting to grow faster leading up to 2020. This fits the fact pattern.

However, I rate this one as MOSTLY TRUE because we don’t have good empirical evidence linking teacher salaries with the supply of teachers. It’s certainly likely to have an effect, but it would be nice to have more-precise estimates of how much a change in starting salary would affect the supply of new teachers.

Still, this theory bodes poorly for the coming years. Teacher salaries tend to be sticky and trail the broader economy. As inflation has risen rapidly over the last year, teachers’ starting salaries have not kept up. That could put a damper on the number of new candidates who want to enter the profession in the coming years.

Theory #5: Newly erected barriers have made it harder and less desirable to teach.

You may not remember it now, but, during the Obama Administration, there was lots of talk about “raising the bar” on the teaching profession by making it tougher to become a teacher. The agencies that accredit teacher-preparation programs merged together and adopted tougher standards for who could enter their programs by adopting higher GPA and ACT/ SAT score requirements, among other measures.

Around the same time, 18 states adopted a new, more-rigorous teacher-licensing test called the edTPA in the hopes that it would do a better job of screening out ineffective candidates. When researchers at the University of Illinois looked into how the adoption of the edTPA affected the supply of new teachers, they found that it “reduced the number of graduates from teacher-preparation programs by 14 percent.”

In 2010 and 2011, states also enacted a number of other teacher reforms, such as implementing tougher evaluation systems, more rigorous bars for tenure, and new licensure exams. A paper by Matt Kraft and colleagues found that these “accountability reforms reduced the number of newly licensed teacher candidates and increased the likelihood of unfilled teaching positions, particularly in hard-to-staff schools.”

These reforms might have been worthwhile if they scared away some teachers who would not have been effective in the classroom, but I’d rate the barriers-to-entry theory as MOSTLY TRUE for explaining the decline in the total supply of new teachers. It has some solid empirical evidence behind it, but the timing is conflated by other factors, and it doesn’t explain the slight increase in recent years.

Theory #6: Broader economic trends have pushed would-be candidates into other fields.  

The number of people completing degrees in education has gone down over time, but it’s down by a similar rate as the number of people completing degrees in ethnic, cultural, and gender studies; English language; foreign languages; and library science. In fact, some of the biggest changes over the last decade have been in relation to the decline in the number of people completing degrees in broader liberal arts and humanities programs.

I’d rate this theory as TRUE. Rather than being an outlier, education fits well within the broader societal patterns. Over time, people have chosen to study business, nursing, and computer science and other STEM fields at the expense of the humanities, including education.

What’s next? And what can policymakers do?

Based on the timing and the magnitude of the declines in new teacher candidates, I think it’s fair to give partial credit (or blame?) to three main factors: low starting salaries, tougher barriers to entry, and broader economic trends. State and local policymakers can do little about the macroeconomy, but they do have authority on the other two factors.

First, if policymakers are worried about teacher shortages, they should really focus on starting salaries. Starting salaries are the most likely factor to affect potential candidates. Teacher turnover is highest among teachers in the early stages of their careers. And yet states like Alabama and Mississippi recently adopted eye-popping pay raises for the longest-serving veterans. Boosting starting pay may have been a better bet to improve recruitment and retention rates.

District leaders should be looking at their specific shortage areas. If they suffer from chronic shortages in certain schools or struggle to staff special-education and STEM roles, they may want to revisit their compensation packages. Over the last two years, we’ve seen a number of districts adopt flat-dollar incentives to address their longstanding recruitment and retention issues. Districts struggling with staffing shortages in specific areas may want to consider similarly targeted approaches.

State leaders are already considering modernizing their licensure requirements. First we saw it during the pandemic with the requirements for new teacher candidates, then states started to drop requirements for who could be a substitute teacher. More recently, New York decided to drop the edTPA over concerns it was reducing supply and harming diversity efforts. Will we see more of this?

Some people are concerned about teacher quality suffering, but it could be a good thing if states are eliminating entry requirements that do not have a strong link to effectiveness. The current requirements keep out some promising candidates but have little value in predicting who’s going to become a good classroom teacher. Instead, states could give more autonomy to districts to select their own teachers at the front end, while requiring teachers to demonstrate effectiveness in order to qualify for more permanent, advanced instructional roles.

Districts may not control the licensure requirements for teachers, but they do determine what types of educational credentials they need in other roles. With the unemployment rate for college graduates near all-time lows, districts will need to think carefully about their labor needs. Can they change who they consider for their job openings, which might mean potentially lowering their educational requirements? Will they partner with students or families to play a more active role and fill some of the district’s labor needs, as some districts have done already?

The issues are complicated, and it’s tempting to craft a narrative based on what’s hot in the news today. But it’s important to align our story with the actual facts on the ground. The data is pointing to actionable steps for policymakers, if they’re willing to listen.

Chad Aldeman is policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

When Congress passed the American Rescue Plan in March 2021, we were happy to see that it included new language requiring districts to protect high-poverty schools from disproportionate budget cuts. In the last recession, state revenue declines hit districts hard, forcing hiring freezes and seniority-based layoffs that often hurt the poorest schools most.

Thankfully, state revenues are quite healthy, with many states announcing higher-than-anticipated increases in funding for schools. Like many others who follow school finance closely, we assumed the new “maintenance of equity,” or MoEquity, provision would only be relevant in the small handful of places with revenues declining.

But then, this summer the U.S. Department of Education released its guidance on the MoEquity provision, asserting that the provision applies even if revenues are growing. As written, it would have forced thousands of districts to rewrite their budgets just as they were trying to reopen schools. After hurried and intensive behind-the-scenes conversations and a lightning- fast-by-government-standards response, the department released a new Dear Colleague letter which gives districts more flexibility on how to implement the MoEquity rule and permits districts with rising revenues to file for a one-year delay.

While districts will appreciate the added flexibility and the timeline extension, the more expansive interpretation could still have unintended consequences, and there may be better mechanisms to drive equity than the formulas dictated in the guidance.

How the MoEquity Provision Works

The law states that:

As a condition of receiving funds under section 2001, a local educational agency shall not, in fiscal year 2022 or 2023—

(A) reduce per-pupil funding (from combined State and local funding) for any high poverty school served by such local educational agency by an amount that exceeds

(i) the total reduction in local educational agency funding (from combined State and local funding) for all schools served by the local educational agency in such fiscal year (if any); divided by

(ii) the number of children enrolled in all schools served by the local educational agency in such fiscal year

A similar rule governs staffing levels. Many people, your authors included, read this language as only applying to districts that were reducing their spending.

The U.S. Department of Education interpreted it differently. The department said that districts with flat or growing revenues had zero reductions and that, thus, no high-poverty school could see a reduction greater than zero in either spending or staffing ratios. The law exempts small districts under 1,000 students, but that still leaves about 7,000 districts potentially on the hook.

The law includes a specific definition of “high-poverty schools,” for this provision only. Every district must rank each of their schools in terms of poverty. The district’s highest-poverty 25 percent of schools are protected “high-poverty” schools for purposes of MoEquity. Every district—regardless of whether all of its students are low-income, or whether the district has only a few pockets of poverty—must rank their schools in this manner to create a list of protected schools.

Each of the protected schools must meet a spending and a staffing test. They cannot experience a decline in per-pupil spending or staff per pupil over the next two school years, as compared to the 2020-21 school year. Figure 1 shows the formulas behind each of the tests. The tests are administered for each of the protected high-poverty schools individually.

 

Figure 1: Districts must pass MoEquity fiscal and staffing tests

 

These formulas may appear reasonable at first blush. But their reliance on student enrollments, the comparison with the prior year’s allocations, and the focus on individual schools could ultimately force districts into some costly, inefficient, and potentially inequitable decisions.

Timeline Problems Pose a Challenge for Equity

The first challenge for the MoEquity provision—and really any federal rule attempting to govern district-level spending decisions in real time—is that most districts simply don’t have school-by-school budgets. That means they don’t always look at the school by school consequences of their budgeting decisions.

It wasn’t until the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act that states began collecting school-by-school expenditure totals, but that took time, and the most current data at this point are from 2018-19. While our team at the Edunomics Lab recommends more districts put that type of data to use, we are not aware of many district budget offices that are actually equipped to do it in real time yet.

So instead of actual expenditures, the MoEquity rules will rely on estimates and projections. To set a baseline, districts can use prior enrollment data, an average of enrollment over multiple years of time, or estimate enrollment data for the coming year. When looking forward, districts can meet the tests by using average teacher salaries and projected staffing levels, rather than actual expenditures.

These flexibilities will help ease the implementation challenges, but they’ll undermine the underlying goals of the MoEquity provision. Using average teacher salaries, for instance, can hide large pay discrepancies across schools. And districts could put forward ambitious hiring plans on paper, only to be thwarted by hiring challenges. The guidance explicitly exempts districts with “unpredictable changes in student enrollment or personnel assignments.” Once a district determines it passes the tests based on its estimates, it does not have to re-examine its results.

Creative financial officers will be able to figure out how to pass the MoEquity tests by finding an enrollment metric that fits their purposes. But in an ideal world, we’d want districts to track actual results, not just certify their intentions. In other words, the MoEquity guidance may provide the appearance of equity without actually ensuring it.

The Outliers Problem

The MoEquity rule protects individual schools, and the protected schools cannot be considered as a group. It doesn’t matter why a school might have received extra dollars or staffing in the prior year, the funding levels must stay, even if the funding comes at the expense of other schools or if the rationale for the extra funding is no longer relevant (such as when a student with disabilities no longer needs a dedicated aide). The federal guidance invites requests for exemptions but cautions that very few will be granted.

In the real world, these outlier cases are quite common. They vary by location, but they’re usually tied to where a school’s enrollment happens to be unusually low or some spending anomaly has pushed up the per-pupil figures outside of a normal range. If a school received $25,000 per pupil in prior years, MoEquity will require that for each additional student at the school, the district must allocate another $25,000, regardless of the needs of the new student.

More Equitable Districts May Be More Likely To Fail

Because the MoEquity rule compares districts with their own prior spending, it will hold more equitable districts to a higher standard than less equitable ones. In our forthcoming study of 40 large districts, we found Denver to be the most “progressive” in that it spent nearly $1,500 more in state and local funds on its low-income student as compared to its non-low-income students. Some districts were regressive, meaning they spent less on their low-income students than their non-low-income students. A progressive district like Denver will be required to clear a much higher hurdle (involving more dollars) to pass the MoEquity tests than more regressive districts will.

The Remedies Could Be Counterproductive

Perhaps most concerning, the MoEquity provision could work to supersede districts’ other efforts to send more resources to low-income students. To pass the tests, districts might have to override their weighted student formulas or targeted allocation formulas — many of which are used to direct more dollars to schools with higher concentrations of English learners, foster or homeless students, students with disabilities, and students living in poverty. That runs counter to the goals behind the MoEquity provision, and there are better options that could more reliably ensure districts are allocating their dollars toward students who need them the most.

What Should the Department of Education do instead?

On average, the federal government provides about 8 percent of school district budgets. It’s understandably tempting but practically complicated to use that leverage to steer how districts spend the other 92 percent of their budgets. The recent rounds of federal relief funds provide a large infusion of money, but that’s temporary. The feds should not abandon the notion of pressing states and districts to more equitably distribute resources, but Washington will need to carefully think through any financial test to understand how it will play out across districts and schools to ensure it isn’t unleashing more harm than good.

In the long run, Congress could consider several alternatives to the MoEquity rules. They could start by calling for more transparency about how districts allocate their money by requiring any district receiving federal dollars to compare how much money they provide to their highest-poverty schools compared to all their other schools. Such a requirement could be a natural next step from the recent ESSA requirement to publicly report school-by-school expenditures. This transparency requirement would have the added benefit of getting more districts to examine and weigh these figures when preparing their next year’s budgets — possibly breaking them out on a school-by-school basis, which would facilitate an easier examination of district spending decisions in closer to real time.

Federal lawmakers are always going to struggle to come up with rules that apply to every district and every school. Instead of the MoEquity’s focus on individual schools, Congress should instead consider a district’s high-poverty schools as a collective group, rather than each school individually. That would avoid the outliers problem. Districts that were found to be regressive could work with their state education agency to devise a plan to address it over a short but reasonable period of time.

Above all else, any federal test should focus on dollars, not staffing levels or other line-item allocations. We warn federal lawmakers against prescribing how districts spend their money or how many people they employ in their schools. The combination of spending and staffing tests used under MoEquity will hamstring districts and potentially force them into staffing and hiring decisions that they won’t be able to afford when the federal money runs out in a few short years.

Without changes, the MoEquity guidance could cause an unnecessary upheaval in American public schools. It could lead to a widespread re-shuffling of spending and staff, with no guarantee that it would lead to more equitable resource allocations within districts. To the Department of Education’s credit, its latest Dear Colleague letter said it was, “eager to learn from the experiences and perspectives” of states, school districts, and other stakeholders, and that it, “plans to use the comments it receives to inform future guidance and potential rulemaking.” So they’re open to feedback on the MoEquity rules now and how those are playing out on the ground.

As districts start planning for their next budget season starting in November, we think the U.S. Department of Education would be wise to consider making its one-year moratorium permanent and to interpret the law as focusing exclusively on the places that are making real reductions to spending and staffing. The specifics of the MoEquity rules make more sense when applied to districts that are cutting their budgets, rather than all districts nationwide. That would provide more time and space to focus on the places truly at risk of making harmful and inequitable spending cuts.

Marguerite Roza is research professor at Georgetown University and director of Edunomics Lab. Chad Aldeman is policy director at Edunomics Lab.

For decades, schools have added new staff at the expense of other potential investments. Now, with billions of federal relief dollars on the way, school district leaders should invest in targeted approaches to address the Covid-19 slide and maximize student learning opportunities.

Over the past year, Congress has invested nearly $200 billion to support K–12 education. School district leaders now face tough decisions about how to maximize those investments. Will they hire more teachers, pay existing teachers more to lengthen the school year or something else?

If history repeats itself, most of that money will go toward adding more staff. The question is whether hiring more staff now would be the best way to help students recover from a year’s worth of pandemic schooling.

We think not.

For starters, this is one-time money. Once the funds are spent, district leaders would most likely have to lay off the thousands of employees they hired.

We’ve also tried hiring more staff before. In fact, adding staff is the main “big bet” we’ve pursued in public education over the last 50 years. Whenever spending increased, so did school staffing. Nationally, public schools spend about $14,000 per pupil. After accounting for inflation, that’s more than double what they spent in 1970.

The vast majority of that money has gone to hiring more staff. Schools today employ many more teachers per student than they did in prior eras, across all grade levels and subjects, including art, music and foreign languages.

But in recent years, most staffing increases came from non-teaching roles. Schools have employed more counselors and specialists, like reading coaches; instructional aides to work with English learners and students with disabilities; and vice principals and administrators to oversee new regulatory and technological tasks. Numerically speaking, public schools have gone from employing one staff member for every 14 students in 1970 to one for every 8 students today.

While some of the spending investments to increase school staff have brought positive benefits for students, it has come at the expense of investing in other critical areas. For example, the new money didn’t buy more instructional time for students. Instead, school calendars look the same as they did in 1970, with the average student attending school 179 days a year for 6 hours a day.

Higher spending has also not led to higher teacher pay. Adjusted for inflation, the average teacher salary is lower than it was in 1990, and barely higher than in 1970. Had we bet on raising salaries, today we’d have a higher-paid workforce—and possibly a more diverse group of teachers.

Another area starved for investment is in different delivery methods, like new technologies or new approaches to use and assign staff within schools. Those strategies might have helped with disruptions like Covid-19, but we didn’t pursue those ideas at scale with increased investment.

Unfortunately, old habits are hard to break. The teachers’ union in New York City is pressuring the district to use the bulk of its stimulus funds to hire 11,500 more full-time staff members. Other places are considering similar plans, and many districts—especially those that operated remotely for the bulk of the year—have yet to announce their plans.

So how can schools invest their money differently this time? The very thing so many students missed this year was time in schools with teachers and peers. Depending on the grade level and school, many students received only half to two-thirds of a normal year’s worth of school, equivalent to missing 60 to 100 days. Recovering that lost time seems like it would be an obvious choice for many districts. Some city and state leaders are looking to allocate funds to help students make up that loss. San Antonio, for instance, is planning to extend the school year by 30 days for the next four years.

Relatedly, because the pandemic had very different effects on students, different interventions are needed to help those students who suffered steep setbacks. Targeted approaches like individual or small-group tutoring could provide the additional time and support to help struggling students get back on track. School districts in Kansas are considering paying teachers more money to teach summer programs. Rhode Island and New Hampshire are working with Khan Academy, the online learning site, to launch a tutoring platform. And Idaho gave a portion of its earlier stimulus funds directly to low- and moderate-income families to purchase educational materials, devices and services.

These examples represent different visions for improving student outcomes, and there may be more than one best option. But that’s the point. As the next budget season approaches, will district leaders find themselves using the go-to strategy of the last five decades, or will they meet the moment with new and different ideas for what students need now?

Marguerite Roza is research professor at Georgetown University and director of Edunomics Lab. Chad Aldeman is policy director at Edunomics Lab. Originally published at Route Fifty.

District leaders may be celebrating the $122 billion in stimulus relief Congress approved for K-12 schools last month. But with more money comes more pressure for local leaders to spend those dollars in ways that do the most good for students while avoiding budget pitfalls.

There are few limitations on the funds. The law stipulates that 20 percent of the money be used to “address learning loss” among students through the use of “evidence-based interventions.” Congressional appropriators listed summer programs, extended school days, or afterschool programs as optional uses of money, but, as a practical matter, districts could justify almost anything from tutoring to improving building-ventilation or even adding more staff. Honestly, we’re challenged to find something that districts couldn’t spend their money on.

However, the aid is temporary. Leaders who commit to things they won’t be able to afford once the money runs out are setting themselves up to fall off a funding cliff in a few years.

So, how can district leaders make good spending choices? Now is a great time to employ the classic “would you rather” test to help explore spending tradeoffs and think through the cost and value of competing investments with finite dollars at hand. Crafting a range of spending options that all carry the same price tag can help leaders grapple with which option has the potential to do the most good for students, while acknowledging the tradeoffs associated with each choice.

The latest round of stimulus works out to an average of $2,450 per student, although the amounts vary widely by state and school district. Consider the following spending options for a district aiming to spend a portion of its money to alleviate unfinished student learning. Each option would cost about the same $1,000 per pupil. For that amount, a district could:

A. Reduce class sizes by two students for a year
B. Extend a school year by four weeks for all students
C. Provide one-third of students with a year’s intensive tutoring
D. Offer 4-week learning camps for all K-5 students this summer and next
E. Give principals the money to decide what makes the most sense in their school

These are back-of-the-envelope estimates, and districts should run their own numbers. But there are clear tradeoffs across and within each option.

The class size reductions in option A would reduce each teacher’s workload a bit, but they would not add any more instructional time for students who may have only received a partial education this year. To make it work, districts would need to hire new, full-time teachers, which could get tricky when the money runs out.

Option B would add instructional time for students, but like option A, it’s a one-size-fits-all approach, meaning the dollars wouldn’t be targeted specifically to the kids who need the most support.

The tutoring in option C could be used to target aid directly to the students who needed it the most. Success will hinge on whether schools can launch a large-scale, effective tutoring program outside of their normal classroom schedules, as well as whether the students who need it agree to participate.

Context matters too. For instance, the learning camps in option D may work better in communities where there’s more appetite for summer programs, but take-up rates would depend on community preferences and the availability of competing options.

Shifting the decisions to principals, as would be the case with option E, allows school leaders to customize supports based on the needs of their own mix of students. While that might spur some innovative responses, it would mean less consistency from school to school.

Another important step in the “would you rather” test is to consider what use of the funds would bring the most value to the family. From a family’s perspective, does their child need tutoring or a summer camp? Or would they prefer to spend the $1,000 on something else entirely?

Every district will need to decide which tradeoffs make sense based on their own community. But whatever option(s) a district picks (from this list or one they draft themselves), the imperative for all district leaders is the same: Focusing on doing the most for students with the money.

Education spending always involves choices. Smart choices require understanding the value of each dollar, and “would you rather” questions help leaders to reflect on their assumptions about how a program or service is best structured, what outcomes will be achieved, the benefit to the student, and at what cost.

“Would you rather” choices also help build community engagement and trust. Parents, teachers, and other stakeholders can be invited to weigh their preferences among different cost-equivalent scenarios.

It’s no accident that all the spending options presented above are cost-equivalent investments over a limited period of time. That’s because districts can get into trouble when they obligate themselves to recurring spending that has no end date.

Given the time-limited nature of the federal funds, we caution districts against using the funds to hire a slew of new employees in the same ways as they did pre-pandemic. When the money runs out, no district wants to be considering furloughs or layoffs a few years from now. And there are other, more financially sustainable options for adding labor, such as contracting or paying stipends to current staff who agree to take on more work.

One thing’s for sure: District leaders should prepare to be judged for how they spend their federal relief money. Big one-time sums draw big scrutiny. Those who take time now to weigh a range of cost-equivalent options may avoid decisions that come back to haunt them long after the pandemic abates.

Marguerite Roza is research professor at Georgetown University and director of Edunomics Lab, where Chad Aldeman is policy director.

This article appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Aldeman, C. (2019). Health Care For Life: Will teachers’ post-retirement benefits break the bank? Education Next, 19(1), 28-35.