A California legal settlement offers students help to recover from the pandemic. TNS

Howard Blume, Tribune News Service

A landmark settlement announced last Thursday sets new accountability rules for how California public schools spend $2 billion to help students recover from pandemic learning setbacks: educators must rely on proven academic strategies and track progress, which will be publicly disclosed — and if parents are not satisfied, they can file complaints. The agreement brings an end to sweeping litigation that dates to the fall of 2020, when students were learning remotely from home, with campuses closed because of safety concerns.

The lawsuit was silent on the merit of school-based COVID-19 safety measures and campus shutdowns. But it argued that students fell behind during online schooling and the state was not doing enough to remedy the harm. Officials including Gov. Gavin Newsom and State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond have repeatedly defended California’s efforts as thoughtful and generous. They pointed to billions of dollars in state aid for computers and COVID safety measures as well as early access to vaccines for teachers and other school workers.

In the settlement, the state admits no wrongdoing. State officials were not immediately available for comment as the settlement was announced.

The agreement comes as a report, released last Wednesday, added to the body of research about the depth of harm to students in California and throughout the nation, starting from the pandemic’s outset in about March of 2020. The latest research indicates that recovery is lagging. Students in seventeen states, including California, remain more than a third of a grade level behind 2019 levels in maths. Students in 14 states remain more than a third of a grade level behind in reading. While California’s English language arts scores were high enough to avoid this list, its scores actually got worse from 2022 to 2023, despite students’ being back on campus, stated the report, titled the Education Recovery Scorecard.

Overall, academic recovery in California had “barely begun” as of spring 2023, according to this ongoing research, a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University.

Moreover, the academic setbacks were larger in high-poverty districts such as San Bernardino, Bakersfield, Fresno and Long Beach, where achievement fell by more than two-thirds of a grade level in maths and more than a third of a grade level in reading, the report said. “Educational outcomes are more unequal now than in 2019,” said Stanford Professor Sean Reardon. “If California state and local education policymakers don’t act soon and decisively, that inequality is likely to become permanent.” “No one wants to see poor kids footing the bill for the pandemic, but that is the path California is on,” said Harvard Professor Thomas Kane. “With federal relief dollars drying up, state leaders must ensure the remaining dollars are used for Summer 2024 and for tutoring and after-school next year.”

Thursday’s settlement is part of ongoing efforts to help students recover. The state funding is not new. These dollars were previously set aside, as part of the 2023-24 budget, for pandemic recovery. School districts have left portions of these funds unspent, taking advantage of a multiyear timeline for making use of the money, said the attorneys who sued the state. The settlement overlays a detailed structure for how this money must be used moving forward — with the intent of reaching more of the students most in need — and with more safeguards.

In addition, there are new rules to hold schools and school districts accountable, including making the spending plans and their results more transparent to parents and the public.

“This settlement has some strong accountability measures that should help ensure students get the resources they need,” said attorney Chelsea Kehrer of Morrison Foerster, which filed the suit in tandem with the public-interest law firm Public Counsel. The settlement will rely on a process that already exists but remains obscure outside education circles. It’s called the Local Control and Accountability Plan. These plans were part of reforms, led by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, that poured more resources into schools and students with high needs — including Black and Latino students, those from low-income families and students learning English. Broadly speaking, that’s also the intent of the settlement. Schools must explain how their recovery spending will contribute directly to a positive outcome, such as higher test scores or improved attendance. Settlement rules also require school districts to use the money to help the most hard-hit or poorly performing schools or student groups.

A new federal report lends support for providing better oversight of school-improvement plans.

In its sample, the federal review found that less than half of school-improvement plans had components widely considered necessary to be successful. A good plan is supposed to include an examination of needs, assessing where and how resources are unfairly distributed and identifying proven strategies that will be used to help students. Because the settlement makes changes to how state money is to be spent, the Legislature’s approval of the agreement is required. Under the settlement, the total funding available must reach at least $2 billion statewide. If it doesn’t, the state must devise a plan to make up the difference, which could require action from the Legislature. If the pieces don’t fall into place, the settlement would unwind. So far, however, advocates are confident that at least $2 billion is available in unspent funds for the state’s nearly 1,000 school districts.

The money is likely to be available because school systems have tried to stretch out the use of pandemic aid for as long as possible as they sound alarms about upcoming budget problems that could result in reduced services and layoffs. Los Angeles Unified, for example, has tracked the deadlines for each tranche of state and federal pandemic aid, spending the money with the earliest deadlines first. For a while, so much aid was flowing in that districts were unable to spend it quickly, unable to hire the extra teachers, tutors and mental-health workers who could have helped students. But that surplus period is drawing to a close. “If they were waiting for a rainy day, they need to be reminded that California’s most disadvantaged students are in the midst of a thunderstorm,” said Mark Rosenbaum, senior special counsel for strategic litigation at Public Counsel. Absent the settlement, this $2 billion still would have been available for pandemic recovery, but with fewer rules on spending, tracking and reporting.

“At least now, there will be visibility and attention, and the uniform complaint procedure added means that anyone, including parents and caregivers, has a process to call out a district not using the resources in a timely or diligent fashion as mandated by the strategic plan,” Rosenbaum said. “So these are resources that were meant to be used as an urgent crisis dictates, and they now will be.” Schools will have four years to spend the money.