SAN DIEGO -- California schools were handed billions of dollars to help students recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has been tough to track how all 1,000 of the state's school districts have been spending the money and how well their recovery strategies have been working.
A team of researchers from UC San Diego, the Public Policy Institute of California, UC Berkeley School of Education and state Department of Education has assembled to find those answers.
The researchers announced Monday that it is one of a few teams across the country to receive a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to study school pandemic recovery.
The team will launch a three-year study to see which of California school districts' learning recovery strategies matched the most closely with learning gains, as measured by state test scores and other positive outcomes, like higher attendance, said Julian Betts, an economics professor at UC San Diego and executive director of the San Diego Education Research Alliance who is helping to lead the project.
The team will survey districts to see what stumbling blocks are hindering districts' recovery efforts, Betts said. For example, many districts could be pursuing tutoring as a recovery strategy, but could be held back by difficulties finding enough qualified tutors, Betts said.
Researchers will also study how and why school districts decided to spend their COVID-19 aid dollars on certain kinds of interventions versus others, Betts said.
The team will look at both federal and state aid, but focus on one $4.6 billion pot of funding: the Extended Learning Opportunities grant, which schools are supposed to use to provide students additional instruction and support such as summer school, tutoring or after-school programs.
Betts said the team will also investigate a question many have wondered since the pandemic began: whether extended school closures played a role in the levels of learning loss in school districts.
California kept schools closed longer than many other states did during the 2020-2021 school year, but unlike most other states, it did not see a decline in reading performance on national standardized tests.
"I think a lot of us were expecting to see that states that had districts stay closed for more months during the middle of the pandemic saw greater learning loss. It's not clear that that's what the data is showing at all," Betts said, adding that he and his team will attempt to explain those national test scores.
Betts said that while California kept schools closed longer, it also gave schools millions of COVID-19 dollars to help keep students connected to online learning.
He also noted that the state's school funding formula gives higher per-pupil rates of funding to districts with higher concentrations of disadvantaged students, something he said may also be influencing schools' learning recovery.
The researchers plan to report out their findings at least once a year to help inform state leaders and school districts, Betts said.
____
