Prospects for Education Transformation in a Post-COVID America

by Sean Slone, CSG senior policy analyst

During a year in which education has had to be reinvented on the fly with remote learning and parental participation, some have suggested that now could be as good a time as any for a long-needed reset of the nation’s education system. But recent actions by two governors reveal a somewhat cloudy forecast for education transformation in the post-COVID era.

On May 5, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the state would work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to “reimagine” the state’s school system as part of a series of post-pandemic reform efforts that would also include transportation and healthcare.

“Let’s take this experience and really learn how we can do different and better with our education system in terms of technology and virtual education,” Cuomo said at his daily briefing. “It’s not about just reopening schools. When we are reopening schools, let’s open better schools and a smarter education system.”

While there were few details offered on what the reimagination of education might entail in New York, Cuomo indicated it could entail moving away from the brick-and-mortar school building.

“The old model of everybody goes and sits in the classroom, and the teacher is in front of that classroom and teaches that class, and you do that all across the city, all across the state, all these buildings, all these physical classrooms — why, with all the technology you have?” Cuomo said.

That focus on technology seems in line with the new realities all states have been dealing with this year as the pandemic shuttered school buildings, moved learning online and forced many parents into unexpected roles.

But the announcement of the partnership with the Gates Foundation drew some criticism from educators and others who have experienced previous Gates-funded education reforms that they say ultimately proved unworkable. The Common Core State Standards, for example, were developed and implemented with funding from the foundation.

The foundation said in a statement they would work to recommend education experts to advise the state and contribute insights into “how technology can enhance teaching and be a tool for teachers as they apply their craft.”

Maryland’s Education Transformation: A COVID Casualty?

Another action by one of the nation’s governors could derail a long-in-the-works education transformation in another state.

On May 7, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan vetoed a proposed multibillion-dollar education reform plan and the revenue bills to fund it, citing economic challenges brought on by the COVID-19 crisis.

“The economic fallout from this pandemic simply makes it impossible to fund any new programs, impose any new tax hikes, nor adopt any legislation having any significant fiscal impact, regardless of the merits of the legislation,” Hogan wrote in a veto letter.

The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is the product of a process led by a commission formed in 2016. The measure would expand pre-kindergarten programs and career education for high schoolers, increase pay and career opportunities for teachers and increase state funding for schools in areas with high concentrations of poverty. It would increase state and local annual education spending by almost $3.4 billion in 10 years.

Lawmakers could still decide to override the governor’s vetoes when they reconvene in the months ahead. The blueprint authorizing legislation was approved with enough support to do that when it was passed in March.

“While we are in the midst of a public health and economic crisis of an extraordinary magnitude, stopping progress on education and school construction puts us even further behind,” said House Speaker Adrienne Jones in a statement. “We know that there are students across this state that are losing millions of hours of learning.”

Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which served as the lead policy consultant to the commission that crafted the blueprint, explained what’s at stake.

“The Maryland General Assembly has the opportunity to fully implement the single most ambitious effort by any state in our country in recent history to thoroughly redesign its entire education system,” Tucker said in a statement. “Once implemented, The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future will provide the state with a public education system, from early childhood, through college and career preparation, unlike any in the United States…. The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is not an unaffordable cost; it is an essential investment.”

But the economic hardships that state governments seem likely to face in the aftermath of the pandemic in the years ahead could mean that education transformation could end up on the backburner in many places.

Education Week reported recently that “Almost half of the nation’s 13,000 school districts may be forced to make the deepest cuts to education spending in a generation—slashing programs and laying off hundreds of thousands of administrators, teachers and other staff—to fend off financial collapse brought on by the coronavirus.”

As the pandemic has nearly shut down many of the revenue streams that states rely on to fund education—sales and income taxes for example—they find themselves contemplating estimated total lost revenues of $500 billion for the next fiscal year. The education spending cuts that could result from those losses likely will not only force school administrators to make stark choices but drive a recession that will make the divide between rich and poor school districts—something the Maryland plan was designed to address—even more profound.

“What’s so stunning about this recession is that poor districts are going to bear the brunt of these cuts because they rely so heavily on state aid and they don’t have the capacity to raise their property taxes,” David Sciarra, the executive director of the Education Law Center, told Education Week.

Education transformation and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are among the issues being studied by the Workforce of Tomorrow Subcommittee, part of CSG’s Future of Work national task force. The task force, which is made up of state policymakers from around the country, will deliver policy recommendations by year’s end.

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