California plans to spend $2 billion to help students recover from pandemic

In the fall of 2020, around the height of the debate over pandemic school closures, a California lawsuit made a serious claim: the state had failed to meet its constitutional obligation to provide an equal education to lower-income Black and Hispanic students, who had less access to online learning.

Now, in a settlement announced Thursday, the state has agreed to use at least $2 billion earmarked for pandemic recovery to help those students still trying to catch up. And it includes restrictions on how the money can be used.

Mark Rosenbaum, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, described it as a “historic settlement” that will ensure the money goes to students “most in need.”

“Children weren’t getting anything close to the education they deserved, and that was baked into a system of inequality to begin with,” he said.

The settlement requires school districts to identify and assess students most in need of support and use the funds for interventions supported by evidence. Research shows that certain interventions, such as frequent, small group guidance and extra learning time during school holidays can yield significant gains.

State officials say the money — which will come from a larger pot of dollars already set aside for districts, pending legislative approval — is part of an ongoing commitment to serve the most vulnerable students.

“This proposal includes changes that the administration believes are appropriate at this stage of the pandemic,” said Alex Traverso, a spokesperson for the California State Board of Education.

The lawsuit focused not on the state’s decisions to issue pandemic emergency orders or close schools — things nearly every state did in the spring of 2020 — but on California’s response during remote learning.

Although California schools had some of the longest school closures in the country, the case focused only on the first few months, from spring to fall 2020.

State officials distributed more than 45,000 laptops and more than 73,000 other computer devices to students, according to court documents in the case.

But as many as one million children — about one-fifth of California’s public school population — had inadequate access to online classes through September 2020. according to an estimate in court records.

The lawsuit, which represented several families in the Oakland and Los Angeles school districts, detailed the impact of the school closures: Some second-graders had only two online classes that spring; brothers had to take turns sharing a laptop to get to class; a family living under the flight path of Los Angeles International Airport had only a spotty internet connection.

California Department of Education spokeswoman Elizabeth Sanders said the state “took immediate action” when students were sent home from school and had helped secure one million computers for students by fall 2020.

However, the lawsuit alleged that California had failed in its obligation to provide “basic educational equity,” and that many of those who lacked consistent internet and educational access were lower-income students of color.

New national research released this week underscored the long-term effects of the pandemic and remote learning: U.S. students have recovered only a third of their pandemic losses in math, and inequality has widened, with students in poor communities falling further behind than they were five years ago.

While nearly all state constitutions contain provisions that have been interpreted by courts as requirements for meaningful, fair or adequate public education, “I haven’t seen that many examples of similar challenges in other states,” said Robert Kim, executive director of the Education Law Center, an education legal group that was not involved in the case.

Other lawsuits in the school world during the pandemic often concerned school closures, face mask and vaccination requirements, or education for students with disabilities.

However, the California Constitution and case law are particularly strong in defining public education as a “fundamental concern of the state,” Mr. Kim said.

Mr. Rosenbaum said California was chosen in part because it has the nation’s largest public school population, with more than five million students, but similar cases could have been made elsewhere.

“You could take a dart and throw it at a map of the United States, and you would certainly hit a state where children have suffered as a result of the pandemic,” said Mr. Rosenbaum, a lawyer at Public Counsel, a pro- bono law firm in Los Angeles, who worked on the case with attorneys from the law firm Morrison & Foerster.

Politics in California — where the governor and state officials have embraced education equity — also could have played a role in the outcome, legal experts said.

The $2 billion is a fraction of California’s entire education budget more than $100 billion a year. The state also received federal aid to help schools recover from the pandemic $15 billion which expires in September.

Federal law required that only 20 percent of the money be spent on learning loss, and there were few parameters on how the money was spent.

The regulation aims for a stricter approach, with more supervision and accountability for districts.

The families in the lawsuit will not receive personal compensation as part of the settlement, said Lakisha Young, the founder and CEO of Oakland REACH, a parent group that worked closely with families in the lawsuit.

But, she said, “my heart breaks when I can say to them, ‘Your voice matters.’”