In the coming months, an extra $31 billion in funding will be dispersed to public schools across the United States, thanks to the $2 trillion stimulus bill signed by President Trump in late March.
The money is intended to help state and local education agencies cope with the sudden changes wrought by the pandemic. But will it be enough to protect schools from the expected economic fallout due to COVID-19?
For context, the Obama Administration funneled $100 billion to schools during the Great Recession.
It’s no secret that the United States is staring down the barrel of a possible financial collapse. Until recently, the stock market had been roaring along since shortly after the 2008 recession, when bailouts and deregulation helped push more money into the hands of the wealthiest institutions.
A crash was bound to happen, and observers have forecasted a downturn for months now. Reese Erlich makes this point in a recent piece for The Progressive, noting that “after eleven years of economic boom, a capitalist bust was inevitable.”
COVID-19 is simply adding a catastrophic angle to this inevitability.
But here’s another problem: While Wall Street and big banks were raking in millions of taxpayer money after 2008—much of it hidden from the public and given with no strings attached—some state governments were applying austerity measures to public schools in an effort to shore up shrinking budgets.
In states like Arizona, budget cuts enacted during the last recession were never readjusted after the economy got back on track, leading to years of declining per-pupil dollars, stagnant teacher salaries, and minimal investment in social workers, counselors, and other student-centered support systems.
By 2015, according to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than half of all states were still giving schools less money than they had before the 2008 recession. This situation has improved for some, but as the report notes, many states have also levied income tax cuts that keep revenue out of public education coffers.
This amounts to schools being starved, which despite the “Red for Ed” wave of teacher strikes and wildcat actions that began in 2017 has left public education more at risk from the current economic crisis.
Of course, the funding and tax cuts to education have occurred alongside the longstanding push to privatize America’s public institutions, such as prisons, health care providers, and the U.S. Postal Service. With the spread of school choice schemes—including publicly funded, privately managed charter schools—public schools today are in a vulnerable place.
This makes the sudden influx of billions of dollars from the U.S. government both desperately needed and woefully inadequate.
For context, the Obama Administration funneled $100 billion to schools during the Great Recession—far more than the $31 billion recently approved by President Trump and far less than the $75 billion requested recently by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
Along with the emergency relief package, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is granting waivers to school administrators regarding existing funds.
These waivers, which school districts must apply for, are intended to shift resources from restricted funding pots to accommodate sudden distance learning needs. This could mean taking money from special education programs, which have specific federal and state funding streams, and using it to purchase digital devices or Internet services instead.
Any move that may undermine special education funding is a cause for concern, as public schools are legally obligated to provide services to all children. If states appropriate these funds for other services, it could leave students with special education needs behind, now and in the future. And it’s particularly troubling that most states, even before the pandemic, claimed they never received adequate funding for special education.
In 2019, for example, education officials in Minnesota referred to the lack of special education funding as a “crisis” and pleaded with lawmakers to funnel more money their way.
At the time, Minnesota Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat, said it would be a “real struggle” to pass a bipartisan bill that authorized a spending increase for special education.
This has been a prominent labor issue as well. Teachers who walked off the job recently, from St. Paul, Minnesota, and Chicago to Los Angeles and beyond, have made pushing for more special education resources a key demand of their Red for Ed actions.
That was before the lockdown orders, of course. Now, state budgets are expected to plunge dramatically in the coming fiscal year, perhaps leaving public education in an even more precarious place. This should make us pause before celebrating the $31 billion that Trump authorized.