Future U Podcast’s Post

📊 The results are in on COVID academic recovery spending to date. The Education Recovery Scorecard, developed by researchers from Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Educational Opportunity Project (EOP) at Stanford University, found that federal spending helped start students toward recovery, but there is still a long road ahead. 👨🎓 💵 It found that increases in student performance corresponded to per-dollar bumps in performance prior to the pandemic. In other words, the dollars did not go farther than what we saw from increased funding pre-pandemic. This may be because districts responded with more of the same interventions, by and large. This can be explained by the theory of threat rigidity, which posits that framing a challenge as a threat is helpful in marshaling resources - as evidenced by the $190b deployed toward education - but inhibits your ability to deploy those resources in new ways required by changing circumstances. 💰 With fewer federal dollars coming in and much work to be done, districts will need to make dollars go farther, which will require them to deploy them in new ways. 💡 The report lays out evidence-based ways for doing so, but implementing those changes may also require a paradigm shift away from focusing on the threat of learning loss and toward the opportunity for new ways to boost recovery.