While Las Vegas public school students were back at their desks last September, eight of their school district administrators were enjoying a taxpayer-funded trip to a Hawaiian beachfront hotel.
Clark County School District shelled out more than $30,000 on a Waikiki getaway, $22,000 of which came from COVID relief funds. Two months prior, district bureaucrats also spent COVID funding on a trip to Miami Beach during the Fourth of July week.
Both of these vacations were planned under the guise of recruiting trips. It seems the district employees could not possibly find new employees anywhere other than faraway beaches. They did a terrible job of finding potential new hires at the beach, too; they made no new hires from the Miami Beach trip and collected only two resumes in Hawaii.
Clark County School District, the fifth largest in the nation, is not alone in having spent money meant for learning loss recovery on frivolous pursuits. In Oakland, the public school district is spending half a million dollars for Black reparations. Boston is buying an “anti-racist assessment system” to the tune of $1.4 million. Milwaukee created a new Gender Identity and Inclusion Department.
None of these things help students learn. But that is of no importance to education leaders who used a crisis as an excuse for a spending spree.
Long before anyone had ever heard of COVID, teacher unions and their political allies had constantly opined that they could fix the public schools, if only they had more money. During and after the pandemic, Congress allocated $189.5 billion of relief funding for K-12 public schools.
Education leaders were suddenly handed the largest one-time cash infusion in the history of American public education. Now, President Biden is asking for another $8 billion to help fix learning loss—which $189.5 billion already failed to do.
As Biden asks for billions more dollars to fix learning loss and education bureaucrats lament the upcoming expiration of the relief funds on Sept. 30, it bears asking whether or not more money would have made a difference for students.
In a new policy briefing for the Defense of Freedom Institute, I found that states and major cities that received more funding per student fared no better than the places that received less per-student funding. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores did not rebound any better in the places that received more relief dollars per student.
More than four years after COVID school closures began, students are still paying the price for school closures that lasted far longer than necessary. The COVID relief money’s failure to fix education is proof that all the money in the world cannot fix a system that prioritizes adult politics over student learning.