What difference did $190 billion make for student success coming out of the COVID-19 health crisis?
Not as much as you might think.
An ESSER spending analysis by Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University found some puzzling instances where funneling more money into a pandemic-worsened problem didn’t help schools recover.
The data ultimately points to no “silver bullet” in spending aimed at improving students’ academic performance since the pandemic, says Marguerite Roza, director of Edunomics Lab.
Return on Investment
A crunch of the numbers found that states varied widely when it came to the return on investment of their ESSER dollars. Both reading and math scores increased in districts in states like Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee, where the rate of ESSER spending per student was relatively high (over $1,000) from 2022 to 2023.
States like Nevada, California and South Dakota were also high spenders, but they saw some of the lowest gains in reading and math during the same time period.
Analysts said the difference likely came down to leadership in some states being “simply more effective at steering districts to focus on student learning” in the face of vague spending guidelines from the federal government. Leaders in Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee focused on setting clear goals and checking progress for reading and math performance.
Each chart shows the ESSER funds each district spent per student during the 2022-23 school year compared to the average years of learning gains or losses in reading and math. Source: Edunomics Lab.
One of Shane Woods’ favorite memories as executive director of Girlstart, a nonprofit that aims to empower girls in the sciences, was as a participant taking her own goddaughter to the organization’s back-to-school extravaganza.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
They zipped through activities with rockets and robots, and Woods asked her goddaughter — named Sailor — what she thought of it all when they were heading home.
“She said, ‘I always liked science. Now I know I can do science,’” Woods recalls. “Unprompted — I didn't ask about careers. For her to have that connection lets us know that her perception is already there of, ‘I can do it.’”
The question for the adults who care about girls like Sailor, Woods says, then becomes: How do we sustain that interest?
That is one of the questions and challenges at the center of a recently released report based on the Girls’ Index, a survey of 17,500 girls in fifth through 12th grades that includes questions about their goals for the future and perception of science, technology, engineering and mathematics as potential careers.
While women are not just outpacing men in degrees — girls are doing better academically and completing high school on time more frequently than boys — the push for parity has been moving at a glacial pace in STEM. Though on the rise, women are still underrepresented in both degrees and employment in the sciences and technology.
Ruling Our Experiences — a nonprofit that studies the aspirations, behaviors and opinions of girls — compares results from the 2023 survey to those similarly gleaned in 2017.
Their researchers found that while girls who say they’re interested in STEM grew by 10 percentage points to 55 percent, compared to survey results five years prior, the number of girls who describe themselves as confident or smart enough to earn their dream job has plummeted.
“I want everybody who has a girl in their sphere of influence to be aware of this data, because I think that we all have a role in creating a generation of more confident, competent, and capable girls,” Lisa Hinkelman, founder and CEO of Ruling Our Experiences, says, “whether it's in the STEM arena, or in other spaces where girls’ voices and opinions are needed.”
High Interest, Lower Participation
Girls are interested in science and math. More than half of girls in every age group surveyed said they were considering a STEM career, according to the report, and overall interest is up by 10 percent since 2017 — something that holds steady among grade levels, income levels and ethnicities. Interest increased the most among the youngest girls, those in fifth and sixth grade, by 20 percent.
That doesn’t mean that girls are ready to dive into the field.
The report found a myriad of outside factors and social pressures that may be keeping girls from taking STEM classes or seeing themselves in science jobs.
The share of girls who say they are good at math and science fell sharply from 73 percent in 2017 to 59 percent in 2023, and that includes girls whose grades show they excel in those subjects.
“I think that should be especially concerning when we're thinking about the need to ensure that girls have increased representation in the STEM field, in that it's more than just exposing them to STEM opportunities,” Hinkelman says. “We also have to be simultaneously addressing these confidence challenges and their perceptions of their abilities that are simultaneously impacting what they might do next.”
Researchers also expressed concern that gender stereotypes and misconceptions about math and science could be deterring girls from taking those classes as they advance through school. About 28 percent of high school girls reported that they avoid classes with low female enrollment.
Overall, 56 percent of girls say they have felt excluded from an activity because of their gender, and the majority report feeling “pressured to fit into the specific stereotypes that are thought to be appropriate and expected for girls and women.” About the same amount said they avoided taking on leadership roles for fear of being seen as bossy.
In Girlstart’s work introducing girls in 24 school districts across three states to the world of STEM, which includes after-school programs, summer camps and an annual conference, Woods says that the organization strives to both provide role models and foster kinship. Girls already hear the message that there aren’t enough women in science and technology, she adds, and being the first or only girl in a science class isn’t necessarily attractive to them.
“Our girls like community, our girls like relationships, so what Girlstart does is provide that support network of peers who are like-minded,” Woods says. “You may be the only girl in your physics class at that high school, but hopefully through us you know of other girls in physics classes throughout the city, that you all have a network of support, that you are not doing this alone.”
STEM fields also have a messaging problem.
About 89 percent of girls said they want a career where they can help others, but they don’t necessarily see that happening in the sciences. Less than half of girls responded that they wanted both a service career and a STEM career.
“This gap may exist partly because of the stereotype that women are natural caregivers, steering girls towards traditional helping professions,” the report states. “However, STEM fields offer numerous ways to make a positive impact — from developing new medicines to solving environmental issues. By showing girls how STEM careers align with their desire to help, more diverse talent could be attracted to these fields.”
Crisis of Confidence
The data shows a troubling trend when it comes to how girls reported feeling about their abilities and potential.
The percentage of girls who consider themselves confident in 2023 dipped for nearly every grade level compared to 2017, with the largest drop among fifth and sixth graders. The share of girls who say they are not sure if they are smart enough for their dream career increased in every age group.
The confidence issues girls face extend beyond their perceptions of math and science. About 57 percent said they don’t feel cared for at school, and only 39 percent said they feel a sense of belonging at school.
Hinkelman says she was surprised by the particularly sharp drop in confidence reported by girls in fifth through seventh grades.
“I think girls are internalizing a lot of messages from the world that are telling them that they're not good enough, or they're not smart enough, or that there's certain kinds of jobs or careers that aren't really for them,” Hinkelman says. “For many girls, they have an overall low opinion of themselves and their opportunities and their abilities. I think we see that reflected when it comes to their perceptions of their abilities in STEM-specific areas as well.”
The education system on the whole needs to start building confidence in the sciences at the same time students are gaining competence in STEM subjects, she adds.
Woods says that in a digital world built on a system of “likes,” girls need environments where they know where they don’t have to be perfect so long as they are proud of what they’re doing.
The numbers support what Woods sees in her work. The study found that confident girls were 20 percent more likely than their peers to say they wanted a STEM career. The report found among girls who feel supported and accepted at school also showed more interest in STEM — 50 percent more than their peers.
Girls need to know “that they can take risks in that space, that it is safe to learn from one another, to fail in front of each other to get back up and take it as a lesson or a success,” Woods explains. “That is really what's critical in changing how girls see themselves in these careers and what they can do, so we have to reinforce that STEM will allow them to change the world.”
During her first semester at Southern Methodist University, Savannah Hunsucker went on a retreat with the other students enrolled in her leadership scholars program. The event took them away from the Dallas campus and into the Texas countryside.
“I remember everybody looking up and being surprised to see stars in the night sky, and I thought that was so odd,” Hunsucker says.
Stars were a familiar sight for her, having grown up in a small town 30 miles north of Wichita, Kansas. Yet seeing her classmates’ awe at an experience she took for granted made her realize that her rural upbringing set her apart.
Savannah Hunsucker, student at Southern Methodist University. Photo courtesy of Hunsucker.
Helping more students like Hunsucker feel that they belong at selective colleges is the goal of the STARS College Network. The initiative launched in April 2023 with a group of 16 public and private institutions that committed to improving their efforts at attracting and retaining students who grew up in rural communities. Programs at member colleges include hosting summer learning opportunities and on-campus recruitment events for high schoolers, sending more admissions staff out to high schools in small towns, and tapping current college students to serve as peer mentors to freshmen arriving from places with sparse populations or low density.
This week, the consortium announced that it is doubling its membership — to include 32 colleges and universities (see full list below) — and that its initial benefactor, Trott Family Philanthropies, has committed more than $150 million over 10 years to programs designed to support students from more remote locales.
This growing interest is a recognition of the fact that although federal data shows 90 percent of students from rural regions graduate from high school, only about half go directly to college, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
There are many reasons for this, explains Marjorie Betley, executive director of the STARS College Network and deputy director of admissions at the University of Chicago. Students at rural high schools may lack access to adequate counseling about college options and financial aid, or they may not be offered classes that selective institutions look for among applicants, such as calculus. College admissions officers may never visit their communities. And unlike students in many urban and suburban areas who occasionally walk or drive by universities and see advertisements for degree programs, students living far away from campuses are “not getting these incidental brushes with higher education,” Betley says.
“They are not seeing the full range of what is available to them,” she explains. “It causes ‘undermatching’; it causes students to prioritize what they know and what their families know as opposed to what is the best fit for them.”
On top of all that, leaders of some colleges and universities may not even realize they are missing students from rural regions, Betley says, since there are varied definitions of what counts as “rural,” making this demographic difficult to track. But it’s a population that may become more of a priority on campuses as higher education grapples with predictions that demographic changes and skepticism about the value of a degree may lead to declining enrollment in the coming years.
Will Gruen, a student at the University of Chicago who grew up outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, doesn’t necessarily see it as a problem that there is no easy way to categorize students from more-remote areas.
“Sometimes people have a very clear picture in their head of what it means to be ‘rural,’” he says. But to him, “it’s important to realize there are a lot of different types of communities” in rural places.
Will Gruen, student at the University of Chicago. Photo courtesy of Gruen.
Rather than sort students from diverse geographic regions into tidy boxes, he argues, for education programs “what it should be most about is extending opportunities to communities that don’t have the information and the resources compared to other school districts. Places that are less population-dense often don’t have the same resources that you would see in the city.”
To start to bridge that resource gap, staff at colleges that have joined the STARS network were busy during the consortium’s first year of operations. For example, they visited 1,100 rural high schools in 49 states, with many trips including a dozen or so admissions officers carpooling in minivans.
The work is already paying off. Betley reports that STARS schools extended more than 11,000 offers of admission to the Class of 2028, which was a 12.9 percent increase over the number of admissions offers made to rural students in their applicant pools last year.
Hunsucker, Gruen and two other students from rural areas explained to EdSurge what challenges they faced getting to college and described the efforts they found helpful in overcoming obstacles.
Information Gaps and the Intimidation Factor
An early difficulty in the college selection process for some students is getting access to helpful information about all the options out there.
As a teenager, Hunsucker worried about how she’d measure up in a college classroom. She wanted to enroll at an “academically rigorous” institution, she says, but also knew that “I didn’t want to waste my time applying to schools I couldn’t get into.”
“I really did not know where I stood academically,” she says.
Hunsucker’s teachers and guidance counselors encouraged students to think only about in-state colleges, she recalls. But she suspected that a private school or public school outside of Kansas might work well for her. So she did her own research, watching videos other students had posted to YouTube explaining where they’d been accepted and sharing their grades and standardized test scores to get a sense of where she might apply. That led her to apply to Southern Methodist University.
Even after she got in — and was accepted to the university’s leadership scholarship program — she wasn’t sure if she was ready for the coursework.
“I was incredibly, incredibly nervous to get to SMU and start classes,” she remembers.
She did struggle early on in a macroeconomics course. But then she started going to office hours and the tutoring center, which bolstered her confidence.
“You’re going to be nervous because you don’t know where you stand,” she says. “But if you take advantage of resources, you will do just fine.”
For students from rural areas, the very size of a university can feel intimidating. For Blaise Koda, going from a 500-student high school in Montgomery, Alabama, to Auburn University, which has more than 33,000 undergraduate and graduate students, felt like “a big shock.”
“It can be overwhelming sometimes,” he says. “The biggest class I ever had in high school had maybe 30 people in it. I walked into my first chemistry class here at Auburn and there were 230 students in it.”
In high school, Koda adds, “I knew pretty much everyone in my graduating class. I could tell you their name and we’d had a conversation at some point. That is simply not the case here. You see a new person every time you walk on campus. You could see someone one time and never see them again. That’s definitely very, very different.”
Blaise Koda, student at Auburn University. Photo courtesy of Koda.
What helped Koda adjust was realizing eventually that “in the end, you’re going to find your group of people, and you’re going to hang out with them a lot,” he says. “You can make your own little community, and it feels the same, almost, as in high school.”
Recruitment Efforts and Peer Mentors
What would have helped students like these transition from rural high schools to college campuses? Members of the STARS College Network are testing strategies to improve the odds of students feeling comfortable and thriving.
For Gruen, a big help came in the mail one day when he was a junior in high school. He received a flyer inviting him to apply for the Emerging Rural Leaders summer program for students, held both online and on campus at the University of Chicago — an institution he’d never heard of before. The prospect felt overwhelming, he recalls, and he didn’t apply until the last minute.
Turns out, he says, “it was one of the best experiences of my entire life. I met so many people who had such diverse backgrounds and interesting perspectives, while being very down-to-earth, nice people. That’s what made me realize I wanted to go to the University of Chicago.”
Participating in the program — which was supported by the STARS College Network — gave Gruen the opportunity to apply early to the university during his senior year. He was accepted and claimed a spot.
Chicago has a faster pace of life than he was used to, he says, but adds that people in the city aren’t so different from those back home.
“People often say there is a rural-urban divide, but I think that’s not as true as people make it out to be,” Gruen says.
As a rising senior, Avery Simpson is now doing her part to intentionally welcome more students from remote regions to her campus, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Having enrolled at the institution after growing up on what she calls a “farmette” — complete with chickens, acres of flower gardens and her own beehives — she spent her first semester of college feeling like, she says, “I’m really unsure if this is right for me, if I’m going to be able to do this.”
In the city, she missed her family. She missed how she had known most of the teachers in high school, as well as the students and even their parents. She had an early public transportation mishap where she ended up far from campus and had to walk all the way back. She couldn’t relate to classmates whose parents and grandparents had attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I felt like I had all of these little obstacles I was overcoming freshman year that other people were already used to,” she says.
So when Simpson was searching the student jobs portal during her junior year and spotted an opportunity to work as a rural peer ambassador through a new campus program, she jumped at the chance. Now she’s part of a small team of students who make free resources to distribute to high schools throughout Wisconsin, participate in a free texting service where they answer student questions about college, and go in person to visit high schools and inform teenagers about postsecondary options.
She finds meaning in serving as a role model for them.
“Coming from a rural community, sometimes we forget we’re capable of doing what other people are able to do,” she says. “When I’m at the schools, I can see the impact I’m making on these students, and I can see myself in these students.”
Something crucial was missing from classrooms over the past school year: millions of students who were part of the chronic absenteeism crisis that plagued districts large and small.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
Could better communication between schools and parents alleviate the problem?
That’s the theory one nonprofit has. It partnered with Google for a massive, AI-powered analysis of 40 million messages in its app to find how parents and teachers are exchanging information.
The organization, called TalkingPoints, is betting that helping parents — especially those who are immigrants or are low-income — feel engaged with schools will increase both attendance and students’ academic performance.
Through its new analysis, TalkingPoints set out to find what educators and parents were most commonly talking about via messaging and the tone of those conversations. The messages analyzed were sent through the TalkingPoints app by administrators, teachers and parents over 15 months.
The results found that 44 percent of the messages were around logistics — things like school closures on snow days, says Heejae Lim, TalkingPoints founder and CEO. The next largest class of messages was what the report calls standard replies — responses like “thank you” or “have a good day” — at 34 percent.
Only 8 percent of messages were about academics, followed by homework at 5 percent.
To Lim, that means there’s a lot of room for improvement in how educators and parents are communicating. In an ideal world, she explains, most of those electronic conversations would center on learning.
“We know that research shows that there needs to be more conversations about student learning, behaviors, engagement,” Lim says. “All the other higher-quality conversation topics that we think should happen comes back to: there might be a lot of quantity [of] the conversations. But are they quality conversations? Not necessarily.”
Part of why Lim wants to change how educators and parents talk to each other is because TalkingPoints is turning its attention to how communication can potentially lower chronic absenteeism. The app’s use for that purpose is being piloted in 29 districts with a collective 89,000 students.
The hope is this creates a digital trail of an absent student so that the principal or other specialists can figure out the root cause for why they’re missing.
“We see ourselves as being in this really critical moment, where education inequities are rising,” says Laila Brenner, TalkingPoints’ head of philanthropy. “We have chronic absenteeism, we have decades of learning loss, and then we have this wave of advances in technology and AI that are giving us the potential to really scale, personalize and customize communications in a way that was never possible before. So how do we bring these two things together and really drive the impact?”
Past research that TalkingPoints undertook on its app use in a large urban school suggests that the approach can work, Lim says.
And other research has pointed to the importance of improving parent-teacher communication. For instance, a report from the Carnegie Corporation called engaging with immigrant families essential to students’ academic success.
“Given that students spend far more time at home and in the community than they do at school, building strong connections between diverse families and educators is essential to supporting student learning, especially as immigrants and children of immigrants are some of the fastest-growing populations in the country,” the report says.
What Does ‘Best Practices’ Mean?
One of TalkingPoints’ guiding principles is that opening up the lines of communication with parents — and what Lim calls “high-quality” communication that focuses on academics — ultimately benefits students. Those conversations should be centered on learning, generally keep a positive tone and start early in the year.
According to the analysis, only 31 percent of messages sent by educators and parents of secondary school students met those guidelines. At the elementary level, it was 19 percent.
The roots of the nonprofit were seeded when Lim was growing up in a London suburb, where her Korean immigrant mother worked hard to overcome the language barrier to ask teachers what she could do to support her daughter’s education. Other Korean parents who were likewise eager to help their children do well in class flocked to Lim’s mother to ask what teachers had said.
“My mom became like a parent spokesperson, interpreter, kind of a communications person for the school’s Korean parents, and that I think it really impacted my academic career trajectory and my sisters’ at the time,” Lim says.
It left an impression on Lim, how those parents separated from the school by language still sought ways to be involved.
“Later, I found out that family engagement truly has so much potential to drive and impact student outcomes — there's a ton of academic research that shows this,” Lim explains. “But the blueprint of how to do that well, in terms of best practices, doesn't quite exist, and families and schools face a lot of barriers in engaging and building relationships with each other in ways that can really support the student.”
In some cases, teachers may feel nervous or avoid interactions with parents, worried that it could be too time-consuming or contentious, Crystal Frommert, a middle school math teacher who wrote a book on the topic, told EdSurge in a podcast interview earlier this year.
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