A series of government reports have documented how much of the trillions of dollars purportedly spent on “Covid relief” went to waste — ranging from the hundreds of billions in fraud (i.e., the “Great Grift”) to extravagant local government expenditures (e.g., renovating a minor league baseball stadium and replacing irrigation systems at golf courses).
But out of all that waste, most Americans would consider money spent on countering pandemic learning loss a legitimate use of government resources. (Mind you, many Americans, including this one, would question why public school unions insisted on keeping schools closed for endless periods of time, but that’s a separate story.)
Now several new data points suggest that much of this money has likewise been frittered away, leaving a generation of American students far worse off.
Wasteful School Spending
An in-depth investigation by the education organization The 74 demonstrated that much of the $190 billion in federal funds has gone to projects that often will not directly help students learn. A series of public records requests discovered just some of the ways districts spent their federal relief dollars.
To begin, in Colorado, a charter school network “spent about $70,000 for an exterior fence at its Aurora campus so students and staff could eat outside despite concerns about proximity to the community’s rising homeless population.” While this expenditure says much about social policy in Colorado, it has practically nothing to do with reversing learning losses.
In California, Oakland’s school district used $1.6 million for a payment on
