Extra pandemic school aid displaced local taxes—but did not measurably raise scores

NBER

Districts receiving more federal money collected less local revenue and reopened faster, without increasing per-pupil spending or test scores.

[UPDATE]

Paper co-author Philip Hoxie supplied useful scale in an explanatory thread: the event-study chart shows the local-revenue gap widening to roughly $500 per pupil by 2022. He also stressed an important limit on the result: the estimate applies to a relatively small, affluent slice of districts near the funding cutoff, with almost no Southern districts in the sample.

[UPDATE2]

Education-policy researcher Vladimir Kogan pointed to the tension with other studies that found positive achievement effects from pandemic aid. His proposed reconciliation is external validity: districts clustered around this particular 5% threshold may be unusual, so the paper’s local estimate need not describe the full universe of school districts.