School Districts’ Innovative Use of Pandemic Relief Funds to Support English Learners Underscores Need for Sustained Funding, New MPI Brief Finds
WASHINGTON, DC — While the COVID-19 pandemic took a harsh toll on all students in U.S. elementary and secondary classrooms, it had a disproportionate impact on the nation’s 5 million English Learners (ELs). The move to remote instruction exacerbated existing inequities EL students face, as they were less likely to have access to broadband and more likely to experience family language barriers with school officials. They also saw their access to essential English language development services and learning support disrupted.
Yet the pandemic also precipitated $5 trillion in federal relief measures, including nearly $190 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds that helped school districts mitigate the pandemic’s impact on the most vulnerable and underserved student populations, including ELs.
A new issue brief out today from the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy offers a first look at how school districts across the country have used these pandemic relief funds to sustain—and expand—programs and resources for ELs at historic levels.
The ESSER: Moving the Needle on Equitable and Adequate Education Funding for English Learners brief details findings from interviews with administrators in school districts with large EL populations in California, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota and Tennessee on investments made and innovative initiatives created in supporting EL students in academic recovery, social-emotional learning and student re-engagement, as well as EL instructor retention.
The infusion of new resources has been particularly welcome as federal Title III funding for ELs has been relatively flat over the past two decades and has not kept up with the growing number of ELs in U.S. schools. Even as overall spending amounts increased, when adjusted for inflation, Title III funding is down by 12.3 percent since 2010.
“ESSER funds have not only provided school districts with much-needed relief to address challenges brought on by the global public-health crisis, but they have also allowed investment in needs that have often been pushed aside by other budget priorities or due to a historic lack of funding for ELs,” write authors Jazmin Flores Peña, Julie Sugarman and Lorena Mancilla.
In Chicago, the school district used $2 million in ESSER funds to expand summer programming for 9,000 EL students. Chicago Public Schools has also utilized ESSER funding to hire and train college tutors to work with students in after-school programs at 150 schools across the district, and to expand a 20-week English as a Second Language (ESL) tutoring intervention program to address EL academic recovery. Meanwhile, in Marietta, Georgia, administrators have used ESSER funds to hire new district liaisons who speak Spanish and Portuguese, increasing staff capacity and ensuring that EL students and their families can access counseling to address social-emotional and academic challenges.
With the dispersion of ESSER funds set to end by September 2024, state and local education agencies should find new ways to continue sustaining the innovative programs and resources that are supporting EL learning, the brief’s authors argue.
To ensure continued funding for these initiatives, the issue brief suggests state and local school administrators evaluate and report the impact of ESSER investments on EL achievement outcomes, and leverage policy mechanisms and diverse funding sources to continue to support investment in expanded EL initiatives. The authors also call on Congress to increase funding via Title III of the Every Student Succeeds Act to meet the urgent needs of the nation’s growing EL population.
“It should not take a pandemic to obtain levels of funding that provide ELs with equal and equitable opportunities to learn,” they write.
Read the issue brief here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/esser-funding-english-learners.
To explore all of MPI’s research on policies shaping the K-12 experiences of U.S. immigrants and the children of immigrants, visit: www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/nciip-early-childhood-and-k-12-education.
And for updates on future U.S. immigrant integration research and analysis, click here.