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By Megan Tagami at Honolulu Civil Beat
The state has received over half a billion dollars in pandemic support, but there’s been no tracking of which investments and programs have actually improved student learning.
Read the full articleOver the last three years, Maui Waena Intermediate has invested nearly $300,000 in Covid-19 relief funds in its after-school program, hiring more staff and adding new programs to help students recover academically and socially from the pandemic.
The Valley Isle school’s extracurricular offerings have been a big draw for students, and class attendance has been steadily improving.
“They’re more connected and they want to come to school,” said Jennifer Suzuki, Maui Waena’s media teacher and after-school coordinator.
But while the increased after-school offerings may be drawing more kids to campus, the infusion of pandemic-era funding hasn’t achieved its primary goal: improving academic achievement. Only 26% of students at the school were proficient in math in the 2023-24 school year — the same as the year before, and a slight dip from the year before that.
Maui Waena’s struggles are reflective of a broader challenge in the state. Academic test scores in Hawaii have essentially flatlined for the last three years, despite an infusion of over $600 million in federal support to help schools address pandemic-era challenges, including learning loss.
Test scores released last month showed that 52% of Hawaii students were proficient in language arts last year, compared to 54% in the 2018-19 school year. Approximately 40% of students were proficient in math, down from 43% before the pandemic.
Advocates have been calling for years for the Hawaii Department of Education to provide greater detail about how schools are spending Covid relief funds. With funding ending this fall, a bigger concern is emerging over the lack of information about what the federal investment has achieved.
Principals say federal funds have supported student learning by enabling schools to purchase new curricula, hire more staff and expand access to tutoring and after-school programs. But there’s little information on what initiatives have resulted in the greatest student improvements, even though school leaders will likely need to convince lawmakers next year that the state should spend its own money to continue pandemic-era programs.
The DOE said in 2021 that it would fund a three-year study to assess how different strategies helped middle school students recover from the pandemic, but spokesperson Nanea Ching said the initiative hasn’t been started. She did not say if the department still plans to move forward with the study.
In some cases, it’s too early to tell which federal investments drove the greatest gains in student learning during the pandemic, said Ash Dhammani, a policy data analyst at the Georgetown University Edunomics Lab. The long-term effects of programs from the pandemic may also depend on whether schools can use state funding to replace federal funds, he added.
“It’s really important to highlight now, are we doing right by our students,” Dhammani said, “and did we do enough with this one-time money?”
Covid Funds Spent On Variety Of School Needs
Hawaii schools experienced a smaller drop in student achievement during the pandemic than most states, but it’s concerning that progress has stalled in recent years, said David Sun-Miyashiro, executive director of HawaiiKidsCAN.Improving student achievement was already a major issue in Hawaii before the pandemic. In early 2020, former superintendent Christina Kishimoto called for over 90% of Hawaii students to achieve proficiency in math and reading by the end of the decade. Some educational advocates deemed her plan as overly ambitious but recognized that schools needed to progress at a faster rate.
A revised DOE plan calls for 65% of Hawaii students to achieve proficiency in reading and 50% in math by 2029….