Updated May 21, 2025

School spending is up. So why aren’t teacher salaries? 

For example, from 2002 to 2022, per-pupil spending in the Los Angeles Unified School District rose 108%. That’s in real terms, after accounting for inflation. 

But that money didn’t lead to higher pay. In fact, the average salary earned by district employees rose just 5%. 

These trends are not unique to Los Angeles and are, in fact, playing out in most schools and districts across the country. 

We set out to document the disconnect between rising school spending and stagnant salary levels. 

Nationally, average teacher salaries have been remarkably flat for a very long time. In inflation-adjusted terms, they’ve been around $70,000 for decades.  

Meanwhile, pay for other college-educated workers has risen steadily, leaving teachers behind. For example, an analysis last year found the average nurse made less than the average teacher in the 1970s, but nursing pay has since then while teacher salaries have not. Compensation for other professionals, including accountants, engineers, college professors, doctors, health technicians, managers, officials, proprietors, lawyers, judges and scientists, has pulled even farther ahead.

The most obvious explanation for stagnant teacher salaries would be if total education spending were flat. But that’s not it, because America is investing more in schools. 

The graph below compares the growth in school spending versus employee salaries for the last two decades. Both figures are adjusted for inflation. But, while spending rose 31% per student, the average salary paid to district employees fell by 2.5%. 

If district salaries had merely kept up with total education spending, they would have been 34% higher. That would have worked out to nearly a $22,000 raise for the average employee. 

I’m not the first person to document this. Last year, the libertarian Reason Foundation published looking at state-level trends. It found that inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending had risen across the country and in every state except North Carolina. And yet, there was not a single state where teacher salaries kept up with the pace of overall spending. 

In my home state of , per-pupil school spending rose by 15% from 2002 to 2020 while teacher salaries fell by 4%. In , spending rose 36% while teacher salaries increased by just 8%. In , school spending skyrocketed a whopping 70% while average teacher salaries rose by a more modest 16%. In , school spending rose by 16% while teacher salaries crept up just 1%. Again, these figures are all adjusted for inflation. 

What about individual school districts? I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, to look at local trends. 

Unfortunately, there’s no national database of average teacher salaries by district, but we got pretty close. The NCES Common Core of Data collects the total salary expenditures per district and the total number of staff employed. By dividing these figures, we calculated an average salary across all employees in the district. These are not “teacher” salaries, but we think they’re a reasonable approximation. Particularly large changes in the growth of school spending versus employee salaries could be due to a variety of factors, including rapid increases in revenues or decreases in student enrollments, governance changes or data input errors.

We looked at revenue and salary expenditures from 2001-02 to 2021-22, the last year for which the data were available. We adjusted everything for inflation and took out districts with fewer than 500 students or missing data. That left 8,877 districts that educate about 90% of students nationwide. Use the interface below to see how per-student revenue and salary trends are changing in your community.  

INTERACTIVE

School District Revenue vs Salary Change 2002-2022

For some districts, about 10% of our sample, salaries rose at a rate commensurate with district revenue increases. Washington state districts were disproportionately represented on this list, thanks in part to in state funding explicitly tied to teacher salaries. 

But that means 90% of districts did not raise salaries in proportion to their revenue increases. This disconnect may help explain why some teachers feel their salaries aren't keeping up with their expenses. 

Take housing costs, for example. Imagine someone living on a teacher’s salary in Santa Monica, California, where housing costs are some of the nation's highest. While policymakers have delivered on the budget side, and the total amount of money allocated to the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District has mirrored in housing prices, that money isn’t translating into higher salaries. The district average actually fell by 19% over the last two decades, making it more and more difficult for employees to live in the city in which they work. 

These trends are playing out across the country. In Billings, Montana, per-student revenue rose 51% while average salaries declined 32%. In Philadelphia, revenue per-student climbed by 155% while average salaries fell by 8%. In Buffalo, New York, revenue rose 114% while salaries fell 14%. In Jefferson County, Kentucky, revenue per-student climbed 62% while salaries rose a more modest 12%. 

Where is the money going? The answers vary state by state and district by district, but the national trends provide at least some answers. 

The biggest factor is the number and type of staff. Schools employ a lot more people than they used to, meaning they have to divide their budgets across more workers. While enrollment rose 4% from 2002 to 2022, the number of full-time equivalent rose three times as fast, led by particularly large increases in instructional coordinators, classroom aides and district administrative staff. 

But these figures actually mask another trend. According to Census Bureau , schools employed about 200,000 fewer part-time workers in 2022 than they had in 2002. (Part of that was due to COVID.) Meanwhile, schools added 540,000 full-time workers. This shift carries real costs because two half-time employees don’t earn as much as one full-time employee, and part-time workers also don’t qualify for benefits like health insurance or retirement. 

And the cost of those benefits has risen rapidly. Since 2004, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has broken out the components of the costs for a school district to a teacher. In 2004, base salaries and wages represented 74% of a teacher’s total compensation package, the rest being a combination of health care benefits, retirement plans and Social Security contributions. Over time, total teacher compensation has grown faster than inflation, even though the salary component has not. Instead, benefits costs, especially , have increased rapidly, eating up a larger and larger share of district budgets. 

These changes have been slow and gradual over many years, but they have all played a role in stagnant salaries. State, district and school leaders should dig into these trends if they want to boost take-home pay in their communities.

Clarification: This story has been updated to note that particularly large changes in growth of school spending versus employee salaries could be due to a number of factors. In addition, we noted that salary calculations do not include additional compensation such as retirement or health benefit contributions. 

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine used his recent State of the State speech to proclaim the importance of child care and education, but a national report released last week ranks Ohio near the bottom of the country in preschool spending.

The National Institute for Early Education Research’s report showed nationwide disparities in access, quality and funding for preschool, with Ohio sitting at 43rd in total reported spending on the early education.

“Most states have not committed to serving all children, and even those states that have often fall short,” W. Steven Barnett, senior co-director and founder of NIEER at Rutgers University, said in a statement. “Most states need to increase funding per child substantially to enable providers to meet minimal standards for a high-quality, effective program.”

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The report called inadequate funding “a near universal problem.”

Barnett did praise a 2023 increase in state-level funding of $122 million over two years as part of the most recent state budget, as well as a $250 increase in per-pupil funding, the first in the state since 2009. Ohio ranked 36th in state-specific spending on preschool in the new report, which specifically studied the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce’s publicly funded Early Childhood Education program for the 2022-2023 school year.

That boost followed a reduction in the 2022-2023 school year, when state spending dropped $268 per child from the 2021-2022 year.

“We encourage Ohio to keep up the progress, as much work remains to provide access to full-day, adequately funded early learning opportunities that will help children develop and parents earn a living,” Barnett wrote in a release on the new data.

Ohio has a total of 18,000 children enrolled in pre-K education, with 35% of the school districts offering a state-funded program. The federally funded Head Start program for ages 3 and 4 has a state enrollment of 24,649. No state contributions go to the Head Start program for 3 or 4 year olds, according to the study.

Nationally, preschool enrollment rose to 35% of 4-year-olds and 7% of 3-year-olds, with overall state expenditures increasing by 11% compared to 2021-2022 data.

“However, despite this notable progress, most states still fell short of their pre-pandemic preschool enrollment,” NIEER stated.

In terms of access, Ohio ranked 36th for 4-year-olds and 26th for 3-year-olds.

saw Ohio in 36th for 4-year-old enrollment, but slightly lower at 27th for three-year-old enrollment.

In the 2024 research, Ohio only met half of the 10 benchmarks noted in the report.

Benchmarks met by the state in the most recent NIEER report included early learning and development standards; curriculum supports; specialized training for teachers; screening and referral; and its continuous quality improvement system.

Researchers found the state hadn’t met benchmarks in teacher degrees, assistant teacher degrees, staff professional development, maximum class size and staff-to-child ratios. This data was identical to last year’s met and unmet benchmarks for Ohio.

An associate degree is required in the state for pre-K teachers, but the NIEER benchmark is a bachelor’s degree. For assistant preschool teachers, the Ohio requirement is a high school diploma, though the NIEER sets a benchmark of a child development associate credential or equivalent credential.

Maximum class size set in Ohio is 24 for 3-year-olds and 28 for 4-year-olds, though NIEER recommends 20 or lower.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

The Golden State: it’s where America looks for progress.

But leading the curve isn’t an unalloyed good. Various booms powered by its tech sector have brought California a dynamic labor market and simultaneously . California is pioneering aggressive policies for slowing the pace of climate change even as escalating and uncertainties leave it ahead of most states in facing climate change’s consequences.

Perhaps most of all, California is the American vanguard when it comes to demographics. America’s future is moving towards and diversity—versions of those trends have already arrived in California’s present. As my co-author Jonathan Zabala and I put it in our recent Century Foundation report, :

In 2021–22, the state’s schools were 56 percent Latino/a/x, 10 percent Asian, 5 percent African-American, 4 percent multiracial, and 2 percent Filipino. Just 21 percent of California students identify as white. In 2022, roughly 40 percent of California K–12 students . California schools enroll —meaning that the state’s ELs constitute more than 21 percent of the U.S.’ 5 million ELs.

California leans global: never of the state’s economic output to other countries’. But when it comes to its genuinely international-grade linguistic diversity, California has long been ambivalent. In 1998, the state’s voters passed Proposition 227, mandating monolingual, English-only instruction across its schools. It took nearly two decades — and piles of research showing that this approach is ineffective — before the state in a 2016 referendum and embraced in California classrooms.

charts California’s progress in the seven years since then. The state has done much to align its vision for ELs’ success with research on these children’s linguistic and academic development—in particular, by prioritizing access to bilingual instruction. After the 2016 referendum, state leaders launched initiatives setting ambitious goals for improving ELs’ educational opportunities in the state’s schools—the and . In the latter, for instance, the state pledged to “quadrupl[e] the number of [dual-language immersion] programs from 407 in 2017 to 1,600 in 2030,” and have “three out of four students [be] proficient in two or more languages, earning them a State Seal of Biliteracy.”

State legislators have backed these — and related — objectives with some modest resources, including $10 million in state grants to launch 55 new dual-language programs in coming years. It has also provided funding for several programs aimed at increasing the diversity of California teachers and/or filling teacher shortages that include .

And yet, much remains to be done. That $10 million in grants reached 27 local education agencies, leaving 991 without any funding incentive to convert their English-only programs to bilingual campuses. That’s nowhere near enough to reach the Global California goals. As of 2019–20, California enrolled roughly 1 in 6 of its more than 1 million ELs in some form of bilingual education or dual-language immersion—. This ranks California well behind its peers—both EL-rich states like Texas and Illinois and less linguistically diverse states like Wisconsin and Alaska.

, this is partly driven by a shortage of state funding for bilingual and dual-language programs. California’s single $10 million dual-language immersion grants competition is nowhere near large enough to keep pace with other states:

���ٲ���— and has an annual K–12 education state budget of just over $8 billion—still than $5 million to its dual-language immersion program in 2023, and has appropriated more than $7.3 million to the program for 2024. Since 2012, Delaware—a state with and an annual K–12 education budget of not quite $2 billion—has annually spent and on dual-language immersion expansion…California, by comparison, and has an annual K–12 [state education]budget of .

Forget international comparisons—when it comes to building a genuinely multilingual public education system suited to the 21^st century’s global economy, California isn’t even atop the U.S.’s interstate leaderboard. The state simply has not yet made it a priority to invest proportional resources into programs that meaningfully extend ELs’ access to bilingual and/or dual language opportunities.

Indeed, support for ELs’ bilingualism has not been a priority even in other new statewide education reforms. As we outline in the report, though California has invested major new public resources in trying to achieve universal access to early education programs for 4-year-olds and growing the state’s roster of community schools — ELs’ unique strengths and needs have not been central to these initiatives’ designs.

This is equal parts frustrating and surprising for a state with California’s political climate and demographic advantages. An overwhelmingly progressive state that publicly proclaims the value of its students’ remarkable linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity cannot celebrate these very modest bilingualism investments as sufficient.

These choices manifest themselves in a variety of ways, including how much money states provide for their public schools, how many people work in those schools and in what types of roles, and how teachers are recruited and trained. Here are five big differences: 

1. Per-pupil spending 

At the national level, public schools an average of $15,810 per pupil in 2019-20, not including debt or construction costs. But that figure hides tremendous variation across the country. Idaho and Utah schools, for instance, spent less than $10,000 per pupil, whereas Vermont; Washington, D.C., and New York schools spent upward of $25,000 per student. 

In real, inflation-adjusted terms, school spending nationally is 6% higher than it was a decade ago, and it’s up 28% over the last two decades. The gap between states is also growing over time. Over the last 20 years, the 10 lowest-spending states have increased their school funding by 16%, while the top-spending states have boosted theirs by 48%. 

These figures are not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, and it is clearly cheaper to live in Boise than in New York City. But other decisions are driving these spending differences as well. 

2. Student-to-teacher ratios 

According to the most recent , Vermont has the lowest student-to-teacher ratio in the country, at 10.5 students for every teacher. Maine, D.C., New Hampshire, New Jersey and New York were all under 12 to 1. The data are in terms of full-time equivalent employees, or FTEs, which account for the number of hours an employee actually works.  

In contrast, states in the South and West tend to have far more students per teacher. Oregon, Idaho, Louisiana, Florida, Alaska and Washington are all clustered together at just under 18 to 1. Alabama comes next, at 19 to 1, followed by California, Arizona and Utah at over 22 students per teacher. 

To put it another way, in per-student terms, Vermont public schools employ more than twice as many teachers as California, Arizona or Utah schools do. 

3. Total staffing levels 

Nationally, teachers make up just under half of all public school employees. But that ranges from 31% in Ohio up to 60% in Idaho. That is, Idaho’s investments in education are more likely to go to teachers, whereas Ohio’s are more likely to go to other types of staff. 

As with teachers, Vermont has the lowest student-to-staff ratio, with just 4.5 students for every full-time equivalent staff member. Maine, Connecticut, D.C., Ohio and New Hampshire are all below 5.5 students per school employee. Some of these states are among the most expensive places to live, but their staffing choices also make their schools more expensive.

On the other end, some states operate with much leaner staffing models. For example, public schools in Alabama, Arizona, Idaho and Washington schools all have 10 to 12 students per staff member. In other words, the typical public school in some states employs about half the staff as is common in other states.

4. Teacher preparation programs 

States also get their teachers through very different pathways. According to the 2020-21 , about 30% of educators in their first three years in the classroom came through an alternative certification program. 

Midwestern and Northeastern states tend to rely less on alternative routes and more heavily on traditional training. Among states with reliable data, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Michigan, Connecticut and Kansas all have less than 20% of their new teachers coming through alternative programs. 

On the higher end, more than half of all new teachers enter through nontraditional routes in Florida and Texas. New Mexico topped the list, with nearly two-thirds of all new teachers entering teaching in this way. These states may be making pragmatic decisions about local supply and demand, but relying more heavily on alternative programs also improves teacher and likely lowers for teachers, while it may come at the cost of .  

5. Teacher credentials 

Teachers are very well educated, and more than 60% have earned a master’s degree or higher by their third year in the profession ( of all American adults). 

But those national trends mask wide variation across the states. Only 30% to 40% of teachers in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and South Dakota have earned a master’s, versus 87% in Massachusetts, 91% in Connecticut and 96% in New York. 

In other words, the teaching profession looks very different depending on which state you happen to live in. What might appear weird to people in New York or Massachusetts may be standard practice for teachers, educators and schools in Florida or Arizona. As schools across the country work to re-engage students and get them back on track academically, it’s worth learning from these differences and understanding what can be ignored versus might be worth replicating.  

LINCOLN — Spending to rescind a new school choice law in Nebraska, along with expenditures to retain it, have topped $2 million, according to the most recent state campaign spending reports.

The bulk of the money came from two sources: teachers unions that oppose school-choice laws; and an organization backed by former Trump administration official Betsy DeVos that promotes use of state funds for private and parochial education.

The reports, which covered up to July 26, indicated that Support Our Schools, on the Opportunity Scholarships Act on the 2024 ballot, had raised over $1.3 million and spent more than $1.2 million.

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The referendum drive has set a goal of collecting 90,000 signatures of registered voters in Nebraska. It must submit about 61,000 valid signatures by a deadline of Aug. 30.

“We are not there yet, but we are well on our way,” said Karen Kilgarin, a spokeswoman for the Nebraska State Education Association, the state teachers’ union, which is spearheading the referendum effort.

Meanwhile, an organization called Keep Kids First that is urging Nebraskans to , reported raising $746,665 through late July to oppose the signature drive. It reported spending of about $582,000.

Some of the funds are being spent to employ “blockers” who shadow the Support Our Schools petition circulators and attempt to discourage people from signing.

“We do need to be where they are because they are not being honest when they ask people to sign,” said State Sen. Lou Ann Linehan of Elkhorn, the chief sponsor of the Opportunity Scholarships Act.

Scholarships for private and parochial schools

The act, Legislative Bill 753, allows taxpayers to direct half of their state income tax payment, up to $100,000, to organizations that provide scholarships for students to attend private and parochial schools.

The goal of the bill is to provide low-income families the same option to attend a private or parochial school as more well-heeled families. The program is capped initially at costing $25 million a year, though it could rise to $100 million a year after 10 years if the tax break is fully utilized.

Opponents of the act say that by diverting funds from the state, less money will be available for public education and other state priorities.

They also maintain that LB 753 offers an unusually generous tax break compared to donations to other charities, and that in other states, such school choice programs have grown exponentially, gobbling up more and more state funds.

Nebraska was one of two states that didn’t offer any kind of school choice program before Gov. Jim Pillen signed the Opportunity Scholarships Act into law.

The spending reports indicated that 85% of the funds raised by the Support Our Schools group came from two teachers unions: the National Education Association (which gave $800,000) and the Nebraska State Education Association ($316,340).

The primary funder for the Keep Kids First group was the American Federation for Children, whose leading backer is DeVos, a former U.S. education secretary in the Trump administration and a national advocate for school choice. The Federation for Children contributed $583,268, or 78% of the funds raised by Keep Kids First.

Kilgarin, of the NSEA, said that Support Our Schools had more than 700 individual contributors to its referendum drive and that supporters are holding multiple events, each day, to collect more signatures.

‘Our foot is on the gas’

“Our foot is on the gas and we’re going to get as many signatures as we can,” Kilgarin said.

Among the major contributors to Support Our Schools is the OpenSky Policy Institute, a Lincoln-based think tank that opposes LB 753 and contributed $101,099 in support for petition gathering.

As a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization, OpenSky is banned from contributing to political candidates but can spend funds on lobbying and petition drives if that spending is less than 20% of its total expenditures.

The organization’s 2021 tax report indicated it spent about $91,000 on lobbing activities and had an overall budget of about $1 million.

Rebecca Firestone, OpenSky’s executive director, said “good accountants” will help ensure that the organization stays below the 20% limit.

She said the Opportunity Scholarships law is not only bad tax policy, but that in other states, such school choice programs grow larger and larger.

In a report Wednesday, OpenSky said that in Arizona — the first state to provide tax credits for private school scholarships — spending on school choice programs had increased from an initial $4.5 million in 1997 to an anticipated $900 million this year.

Among the contributors to the Support Our Schools effort is former Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle and philanthropist Rhonda Seacrest. They gave $500 and $5,000, respectively.

Some Nebraska business leaders recently contributed to the Keep Kids First drive. They include former Kiewit Corp. CEO Ken Stinson, Omaha beef producer Jim Timmerman and Mike McCarthy, founder of the McCarthy Group. They contributed $25,000 each.

The Sherwood Foundation, founded by prominent Omaha philanthropist Susie Buffett, provided about half of the funding for OpenSky in 2021, according to tax records.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on and .

States and school districts had until the end of September to commit the first tranche of funds — totaling just over $13 billion – that was approved in March 2020. They’ll have the next two years to spend the rest.

Two questions should be top of mind now that the first spending window has closed: What should taxpayers, families and the broader public look for now? And what should they look forward to?

The first one is easy: Now that the Sept. 30 deadline has passed, the public should reasonably expect every school system to demonstrate funding accountability and transparency by making clear how it spent these first vital resources (typically to meet the most urgent, immediate needs dating to the beginning of the pandemic), how students benefited as a result and how it plans to spend the rest. 

The second question is both more complicated and more important. 

With the fourth school year of the pandemic now underway, and despite educators’ often-herculean efforts, the work remains extraordinarily challenging:

The latest results show that the nation’s students lost two decades of progress in reading and math for 9-year-olds from 2020 to 2022, with the worst impact on children who were experiencing academic challenges before COVID.

in many school systems across the country, exacerbating earlier trends and risking instability for already-exhausted communities.

On top of all of this, the political environment is more polarized than ever, tearing communities apart, doing irreparable damage to children and their teachers, and making school and district leadership — which is challenging on a good day — nearly impossible. by my colleague Julia Rafal-Baer shows that recent leadership turnover has impacted districts enrolling more than a quarter of the nation’s students, and it’s hard to imagine the political climate isn’t playing a role.

The next two years of federal pandemic recovery funding will both be impacted by and, in turn, impact these crosscurrents. Having had the opportunity to work in the federal government leading the implementation of these funds and now working with colleagues supporting states and districts using them, it’s clear that this is the time for big bets in the nation’s education system.

If the first tranche of the federal pandemic recovery funds was about stopping the bleeding, the next phases need to demonstrate that schools and districts know how to make the patient healthy.

So, looking out over the next two years, what the nation has learned so far — and what and are already hard at work doing — can suggest whether the country is heading in the right direction.

First, look for change. Students certainly need more — more school counselors and nurses and more learning time, for example — but they also desperately need different. Getting real results, especially for students who have long been underserved, requires implementing clear, coherent, evidence-based and systemwide strategies, not just individual programs. Support for educators is imperative, but success cannot only rely on a single teacher in a classroom.

Second, focus on action (or inaction). Whether a particular community prefers the term “learning loss” versus “accelerated learning,” or “mental health” versus “social-emotional support” versus “student well-being,” the thing to look for is whether districts are addressing those very real priorities: ensuring that every student can achieve at grade level, meeting the needs of the whole child and directing the most resources to the children and schools with the greatest needs. If that’s not happening, terminology is not the problem.

Third, schools are part of communities, and funding needs to reflect that reality. Almost every district priority can be more successful with the support of community partners who can be part of creative solutions, including to address school staffing crunches. Schools can use their funding to engage neighborhood-based organizations in various areas, among them early learning, health services, after-school and summer programs, early and lasting career exploration, employer internships and apprenticeships, dual enrollment at local colleges and other partnerships that make learning relevant and rigorous. This is especially true as schools work to re-engage students who have been driven out of the education system and to reverse glaring chronic absenteeism rates.

Fourth, build stronger partnerships between school and home. One potential antidote to politicization of the relationship between families and schools is to do more to and to strengthen family partnerships. Funding can pay for family-focused technology that makes communication and participation easier; outreach workers and home visitation programs; resources for parents and caregivers to be partners in implementing the, and translators and interpreters to ensure that all parents can interact with their children’s schools. 

Fifth, if states and districts don’t tell their story, no one will. Communities need to see how resources are making a difference for students and families. That means building central office capacity to be able to consistently share real stories of impact alongside regularly updated and readily understandable data on students’ learning needs (and other opportunity gaps) and how they’re being urgently addressed. 

The best bet for avoiding a is not to revert to timid spending decisions. Just the opposite: A brighter future requires boldly showing how the educational and political cost of going back to the days of underfunding schools would be worse than providing the long-term resources students truly need.

The analysis is based on CRPE’s year-long review of the districts’ federally mandated spending plans for the relief money, their proposed budgets and their publicly posted recovery spending strategies in 2021-22. The review is limited to publicly available information.

These strategies preview how the nation’s largest school districts are thinking about postpandemic recovery and what the return to a new normal is likely to entail. The release is part of CRPE’s new , which makes its two-plus years of pandemic-era district data tracking and analysis available to the public.

The work builds on CRPE’s new “State of the American Student” report, which pushes states and districts to define measurable goals for pandemic recovery, or risk graduating a generation of students under-equipped for college or careers. The data is a call to action for districts and states to immediately use their federal dollars to ensure every student in the COVID generation makes a full recovery. 

Highlights from the review include: 

Large and urban districts almost universally prioritize facilities improvements, and most plan to invest in broad student and teacher supports 

Eight recovery strategies clearly stood out in district plans for ESSER spending. Almost all districts plan to upgrade facilities (95). Social-emotional supports are next most common (88), followed by technology (85), professional development (84), extended learning opportunities (83), mental health (79), tutoring (79) and internet connectivity and access (78). 

Districts plan to pursue some specific student-centered recovery strategies

A moderate number of districts detail specific strategies to accelerate student learning and well-being. Just two-thirds mention using evidence-based strategies involving data (64) or small-group interventions (60) to catch up students academically. Similarly, about two-thirds (60) are considering investments to strengthen career and postsecondary pathways. Around half of districts plan to re-engage students or work to increase enrollment (52), or invest in new testing systems (35) to better capture academic or social-emotional data.

But investments in staff and parents are less clear

While most districts plan to provide professional development for teachers, far fewer detail specific recruitment strategies like strengthening teacher pipeline programs or university partnerships (37) or providing more mentoring or coaching (26). Parent engagement was among the least frequently cited strategies, with a small portion of districts committing to improving communications with families (20) or providing new leadership opportunities to parents or community stakeholders (15).

District plans vary widely in detail shared and breadth of strategies

The clarity districts offer on their spending plans varies widely. Some began sharing recovery ideas and inviting stakeholders to participate in planning sessions as early as last spring. Others have not yet communicated full plans or invited public feedback.

A few districts, including Buffalo Public Schools in New York and the Montgomery County School District in Maryland, stand out for sharing detailed plans that profile a range of new supports for students, staff and parents. 

will provide an extended school day and school year; small-group instruction; and new programs for students who have special needs or are multilingual and/or Native American. The district will use data to diagnose student needs and hire new intervention staff. It plans to run an engagement program where parent leaders will support other families in their schools and attend monthly school-based management team meetings. The district will offer professional development on STEM, Advanced Placement and anti-racism instruction and plans to send staff to conferences and workshops. Buffalo also offers its staff members self-paced, virtual professional development.

will use data to select students for Saturday school, tutoring and enrichment programs. It is also expanding sports and after-school enrichment programs to re-engage students. Montgomery County plans to train staff in tutoring strategies, student well-being support and how to target assistance to vulnerable students, such as English learners and children with special needs. The district has also designed a professional learning cohort that specifically targets second-year teachers.

Recovery spending needs to happen in earnest, starting now

While the data on students’ remarkable learning loss and mental health needs piles up, the majority of districts have spent just a fraction of stimulus funds to date. This may have made good sense last school year; districts were caught up in a series of disruptions fueled by virus surges and labor shortages, and they needed time to ground their ESSER spending plans in stakeholder input and strategic plans. Fortunately, the start of the 2022-23 school year is proving to be the least disruptive since the pandemic started. Now is the time for districts to make good on their plans, and clearly communicate how they will restore and advance learning environments for students and work environments for adults. 

Our review finds that large and urban districts are committing most clearly to one-time investments in infrastructure but are less precise about recovery strategies to meet the postpandemic needs of students, staff and families. While stimulus funds are a one-time infusion, districts still have the opportunity to make deep, multi-year investments in services and programs that could better support staff and students. Improving learning and working conditions is just as important as facility or technology upgrades — arguably more so, given and enrollment declines of between 2020 and 2022. It is imperative that districts pair long-term investments in their people and systems alongside short-term investments in infrastructure.

It is also worth noting that plans are also just that — plans — until they are put into motion. Districts on the Education Department’s revised ESSER deadlines in order to execute spending strategies. Either way, given that stimulus funds expire as early as 2024, it is imperative that districts begin to thoughtfully spend them down now. And with , districts also need to clearly communicate their spending plans and reach back out to stakeholders for suggestions.