As students return to classrooms, the educational effects of the pandemic remain unfinished business. More than six years after schools first closed, achievement remains below 2019 levels in many districts. Researchers are still trying to determine how much the nearly $190 billion in federal emergency aid helped students recover.
A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) appears to offer a discouraging verdict. It finds that additional federal aid did not increase school spending or improve student test scores in the districts the researchers studied.
That conclusion seems to conflict with research from the Education Scorecard and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or CALDER. Both found that federal pandemic aid contributed to academic recovery, particularly in mathematics and in high-poverty districts.
But the studies are not as contradictory as they first appear. Together, they offer a more useful lesson. It’s not enough to ask whether money matters. Policymakers must ask whether federal aid becomes additional education spending, where it goes, and whether schools use it for activities likely to improve learning.
