On March 12, 2020, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced the nation’s first statewide closure of K-12 schools to “slow the spread” of COVID-19. Within months, nearly every state in the nation closed schools through the remainder of the spring semester.
Unfortunately, these final months of the 2019-2020 school year now look less like an unprecedented disruption to K-12 education and more like the modest prologue to a nearly 2-year saga of previously unfathomable institutional failure. While it will take years to fully capture the consequences of government policies implemented during this time, the existing data have already begun to reveal several major themes when it comes to the ill-conceived flood of taxpayer spending ostensibly meant to address the harms of the pandemic, Goldwater’s Matt Beienburg writes in a new report, “The COVID Funding Flood: How Spending Surged in Arizona’s Public School System Amid the Pandemic Era.” These include the prioritization of the union political machine over student wellbeing, the massive overspending of federal funds, and the costly cycle of fiscal irresponsibility within K-12 that these policies are likely to exacerbate, says Beienburg, Director of the Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy and Director of Education Policy.
Looking in particular at the fiscal stimulus and expenditure patterns of public schools leading up to and during the COVID-19 stimulus period, the report uses Arizona schools as a case study on the failure of government policies to align taxpayer resources with the actual needs of public school students. Key findings are as follows:
The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of unprecedented spending on public K-12 schools, yet available evidence suggests that the bonanza of federal spending was almost entirely avoidable and that much of it will likely serve a very different purpose than the one originally sold to policymakers and the public.
To avoid this sort of institutional failure in the future, policymakers in other states should seek to replicate the steps taken by the Arizona legislature to mandate reporting requirements on the use of all federal COVID stimulus funds. But they should also enact substantial systematic reforms, like Goldwater’s universal school choice expansion that is now law in Arizona. Such programs offer to bypass entirely the bureaucracy and middle management of our public education system, putting funds directly into the hands of families to spend on the needs of students—and by extension—to the educators whom families choose to entrust their children.
You can read Beienburg’s full “COVID Funding Flood” report here.
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