California is seeking $2 billion for students injured by remote learning to settle a lawsuit
In the fall of 2020, around the height of the debate over pandemic school closures, a serious claim was made in a California lawsuit: the state had failed in its constitutional obligation to provide equal education to lower-income Black and Hispanic students, who had less education. access to online learning.
Now, in a settlement announced Thursday, the state has agreed to use at least $2 billion intended for pandemic recovery to help students still trying to catch up. And it includes guardrails for 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 were not 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 tutoring in small groups and additional 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 had some of the longest school closures in the country, the case focused only on the early 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 — did not have adequate 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 fallout after schools closed: Some second-graders had online classes only twice that spring; brothers had to share one laptop and take alternating classes; a family living under the flight path of Los Angeles International Airport had only a weak internet connection.
Elizabeth Sanders, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Education, said the state “acted immediately” when students were sent home from school and helped secure a million computers for students by fall 2020.
However, the lawsuit argued that California was falling short of its obligation to provide “basic educational equity,” noting that many of those without consistent internet and access to education 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 just a third of their pandemic losses in math, and inequality has widened, with students in poor communities experiencing have fallen further behind than themselves. were five years ago.
Although nearly all state constitutions contain provisions that have been interpreted by courts as providing a meaningful, just and adequate public education, “I haven't seen as many examples of similar challenges in other states,” said Robert Kim, executive director of the Education Law Center, an education law firm group that was not involved in the case.
Other pandemic-era school disputes have often focused on school closures, mask and vaccine mandates, or the education of 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 population of public schools, with more than five million students, but similar cases could have been presented elsewhere.
“You could take a dart and throw it at a map of the United States, and you would definitely hit a state where children were suffering from the pandemic,” said Mr. Rosenbaum, a lawyer at Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm . office in Los Angeles, who worked on the case with attorneys from 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 dollars 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 dollars be spent on learning loss, with few parameters for how the money would be spent.
The settlement seeks a stricter approach, with more oversight and responsibility for districts.
The families in the lawsuit will not receive any 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 a little when I can say to them, 'Your voice matters.'”