California is being forced to spend $2 billion to help students recover from learning loss due to school shutdowns after a legal settlement.
According to non-profit law firm Public Counsel, the state of California will spend some of the remaining COVID-19 relief funds on tutoring and other efforts to help students recover from learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nearly every school in California was locked down for in-person learning and students attended school remotely from home during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Between March and June of 2020, neither of my children learned anything in school," one of the plaintiffs in the case, Kelly R., a Los Angeles native, said.
The lawsuit explained further that the federal government granted public school districts more than $190 billion to address learning loss from March 2020 to March 2021.
The plaintiffs argued that California failed to ensure local districts used that money for students who needed the most help.
Therefore, the settlement requires existing funds from the Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant to go toward hiring tutors and taking other steps to help students rebound from learning loss.
The funding is to be used to help students already facing adverse education outcomes, often children from low-income households and minorities.
"The urgent vision of this historic settlement is not just to recoup the academic losses suffered by California’s most disadvantaged students, but to erase the opportunity gaps altogether exacerbated by the pandemic," said Mark Rosenbaum, Public Counsel’s senior special counsel for strategic litigation.
Regarded by Public Counsel as "one of the largest education-related settlements in U.S. history," California has also agreed to propose a new law enabling funds to be spent on "community organizations with a proven track record of improving student success."
The law mandates that local education agencies operate under a Local Control and Accountability Plan, requiring them to report on the success of any program created to help students who experience learning loss.
A California Dept. of Education spokesperson said that the proposal includes changes that the administration believes are "appropriate at this stage coming out of the pandemic to focus on the students who were most impacted and continued to need support."
"Proposing these changes also allowed the state to resolve the [case], and we appreciate the collaborative approach and the insights that plaintiffs offered that informed this proposal," said Elizabeth Sanders, director of communications for the California Department of Education.
She went on to say, "We look forward to engaging with the Legislature and stakeholders over the coming weeks and months to advance this proposal and focus learning recovery dollars on serving the students with the greatest needs."
The settlement comes after the Department of Education reported in 2022 that average reading scores saw the largest decline in 30 years following the pandemic.
Additionally, the settlement comes after a study was released in June showing progress in reading and math stalled for elementary and middle school students despite billions in federal spending funneled into efforts to change the trajectory.
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In a Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) brief released in June 2023, key findings indicated a sluggish academic recovery for American students in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted traditional learning methods through extended school closures and transitions to online learning.
The California Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
