Phyllis W. Jordan of Future-Ed, a D.C. think tank, explains here what the latest Congressional agreement on COVID aid means for education and compares it to last spring’s CARES Act as well as to the HEROES Act passed in May by the House of Representatives. The agreement does not include any aid for cities or states. President-Elect Joe Biden has pledged another relief package after he takes office.
She writes:
The $900 billion package builds on a $908 billion stimulus bill introduced Dec. 14 and would include stimulus checks, small business relief, unemployment benefits, and support for vaccine distribution, among other things. The measure includes $82 billion for education, with $2.7 billion specifically for private and parochial schools. A detailed proposal has not been publicly released yet, but the Dec. 14 bill included the $82 billion figure and broke it down like this:
- $54 billion of that for K-12 schools, largely delivered through Title I funding. That’s about four times what schools received in the CARES Act approved in March.
- $20 billion for higher education with dollars set aside for minority-serving institutions
- $7.5 billion for governors to spend at their discretion, including on private schools.
School meal programs and child care. and expand the Pell Grant program to support 500,000 new low-income college students. Separately, lawmakers have agreed to lift a ban on Pell Grants for prison education programs, an agreement that will be part of a broader bill to fund the government through the fiscal year.
The Covid relief deal that House and Senate leaders stuck is far below the $2.2 trillion Democratic leaders had been seeking for much of the Fall but higher than the $500 billion that Senate Republicans favored.
The Washington Post summary said:
School funding
• Colleges and schools will have $82 billion to help cover HVAC repair and replacement to reduce the risk of coronavirus infections and reopen classrooms. The Republican summary specified $2.75 billion in designated funds for private K-12 education.
• Lawmakers also struck a deal on $10 billion for child-care assistance.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The current stimulus package give governors wide discretion in the distribution of the funding, contact your local state leaders and urge them to funnel the dollars to local school districts …. “all politics is local,” call your local state representitives, have your parent associations call …, call local media, … create a groundswell in your area …. get on it NOW ….. too many of us are “good” at complaining after the fact!!
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When we got Race To The Top money here in Tennessee, most of it went to things that are sort of expendable. The local school officials complained that the law tried to corner them into paying for programs locally that were created by RTT money. I have no way of knowing if that was true, but RTT did very little to increase the contact between students who needed help and teachers who had time to help them.
Now Covid money is arriving. I will assume that the money will be spent i a variety of ways, but cleaning the air in school buildings sure would be a good place to start.
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Any money to control the pandemic in TN would be best spent on replacing the Governor. We have the highest new infection rate among all the states. No other state comes close.
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simple math.. if you estimate that $54 Billion gets evenly distributed to every school it comes out to about $400K per school. Not nearly enough to prevent layoffs and impossible to do infrastructure improvements.
NYS schools have been hit with a $5 billion cut in aid already. This could only bring less than $2B to NYS schools.
Once again public schools get the shaft. Let’s hope we get a Democrat run Senate and Biden fixes this.
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$54 billion of that for K-12 schools, (is) largely delivered through Title I funding, which means it will not be evenly distributed to every school. I do not intend to plow through 5000 pages shoved out the door, but you can be sure that there are huge gifts to people and programs with the most savvy lobbies.
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“Lawmakers also struck a deal on $10 billion for child-care assistance.”
That’s an amazingly generous amount. There are 26 million kids between the ages 0-5, hence this means $386 for childcare assistance for each child. That surely will make a difference. Like being able to pay for two full weeks of childcare in a childcare center.
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