The Great Recession Badly Hurt Kids’ Schooling; Today’s Recession Could Do Much Worse
Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Whenever our kids return to school, a severely diminished learning experience awaits them unless the federal government learns an important lesson from the past and significantly boosts state aid — and soon.
The last time that states faced a budget crisis, in the wake of the Great Recession of a decade ago, emergency federal aid closed only about one-quarter of state budget shortfalls. Once the aid was gone, states started cutting funding to K-12 schools to help comply with their balanced budget requirements. By 2011, 17 states had cut per-student funding by more than 10 percent. Local school districts responded by cutting teachers, librarians, and other staff; scaling back counseling and other services; and even reducing the number of school days. Even by 2014 — five years after the Great Recession ended — state support for K-12 schools in most states remained below pre-recession levels.
School districts have never recovered from the layoffs they imposed back then. When COVID-19 hit, K-12 schools employed 77,000 fewer teachers and other workers even though they were teaching 2 million more children, and overall funding in many states was still below pre-Great Recession levels.
Money matters in education. As my colleague Cortney Sanders recently noted, “Adequate school funding helps raise high school completion rates, close achievement gaps, and make the future workforce more productive by boosting student outcomes, studies show.” The Great Recession in particular hurt students’ educations, driving down test scores and the rate at which students attend college, Northwestern University economist C. Kirabo Jackson and two colleagues found.
Now, with the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression closing businesses and sending unemployment soaring, state income and sales taxes — on which states overwhelmingly rely to fund education and other services — are drying up. As a result, we estimate that state budget shortfalls over the next three years will total $765 billion.
Federal aid to date, plus state rainy day funds, can close about one-fifth of those state gaps, leaving states $590 billion CONTINUE READING: The Great Recession Badly Hurt Kids’ Schooling; Today’s Recession Could Do Much Worse - Jonathan Kantrowitz