Purpose: The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) requires districts to deliver "evidence-based interventions" to students impacted by the pandemic. The policy has created a unique opportunity for researchers and practitioners to engage with evidence to learn how recovery interventions work and under what conditions.…

As widely reported and documented, the coronavirus pandemic hit schools hard. To address challenges caused by COVID-19, the U.S. Congress created and funded the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER). While educators and the field have learned much during the era of reforming high poverty schools, the challenge to improve…

To address the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress authorized the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF I) in March 2020 with over $6 billion allocated for emergency financial aid. In this paper, we utilize the administrative burden framework to analyze HEERF I implementation for a stratified random sample of…

We synthesize and critique federal fiscal policy during the Great Recession and COVID-19 pandemic. First, the amount of aid during both crises was inadequate to meet policy goals. Second, the mechanisms used to distribute funds were disconnected from policy goals and provided different levels of aid to districts with equivalent levels of economic…

Purpose: This paper applies concepts from organizational theory as well as physics to elucidate the role of time in the US education system's efforts to recuperate from the pandemic. This paper contributes to an important body of work focusing on implementation of reform efforts in education that use time in innovative ways.…

Through no fault of our own, higher education and the world writ large were metaphorically without vision and clarity of sight for the initial few months of the COVID-19 global health crisis as we all tried to stand up protocols, processes, and systems to better identify how our institutions could continue forward safely -- supporting both our…

The COVID-19 global pandemic impacted the United States' educational landscape by intensifying the teacher shortage. In particular, significant help is wanted in filling public school vacancies in specialty areas, which has resulted in non-instructional staff teaching in classrooms and impacting school operations. Federal, state, and local…

Digital technology has been an integral part of transforming educational resources for students in recent decades, however, the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic has focused education on infusion of digital technologies throughout programs to better meet students' needs. School districts have benefited from the American Rescue Plan Act funding and…

To understand the broader societal context for supporting the healthy development and well-being of infants and toddlers, the following excerpt from the "State of Babies Yearbook: 2022 Executive Summary" presents key findings on the status of America's families with young children. As of August 2022, the reconciliation bill proposed in…

Although case management in higher education is a relatively new phenomenon, the challenges presented by COVID-19 have forced many institutions to deliver emergency services in an extremely rapid fashion and adopt case management strategies to serve students in crisis. This case study shares how one large community college system developed a…

Although emergency aid programs have existed on community college campuses for years, no extant research has articulated which emergency resources students apply for and how students prioritize these resources against others (e.g., food needs compared to housing needs). To better understand student emergency aid needs shortly after the World…

During the 2020 period of the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education delivery changed drastically. Using document analysis and interviews with staff and students, in this article I address how the practice of financial aid changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Staff reported that these changes created problems with technology and radically increased…

Black women pursued graduate and professional school, post-degree options, and employment at a time when their economic future and livelihood were unknown. The novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) complicated what many Black women were already experiencing. Guided by critical race feminism, the purpose of our exploratory study was to highlight how and to…

In Fall 2022, the U.S. Education Department unveiled a drastic overhaul of federal student loan policies. The new rules serve as a key vehicle to advance the Biden administration's higher education agenda. However, some of the final regulations look quite different from the policy proposals initially outlined in President Joe Biden's campaign…

As U.S. school leaders anticipate the end of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds and contemplate possible budget shortfalls, they will have to make hard choices about how best to leverage limited resources to improve student outcomes. With the stakes high, lawmakers and experts urge school system leaders to rely on research and…