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While federal spending on K-12 education amounts to just 8% of what it costs to run the nation’s public schools, that funding is essential to supporting the nation’s most vulnerable students argues David Knight, an assistant professor at the University of Washington College of Education, in a commentary published by The Conversation.

The University of Washington is No. 7 in the world for education on the Global Ranking of Academic Subjects list for 2020. The ranking, released June 29, was conducted by researchers at the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Years after immigrating to the U.S., a family crisis forced Ruth Ayodeji (BA ‘15), then a mother of two, to move into a shelter with her children. Yet in that moment of crisis, Ayodeji enrolled her kids in a Head Start program and found an empowering community that inspired her desire to become an educator.

Her children’s Head Start teachers encouraged Ayodeji, working as a caretaker at the time, to volunteer at the preschool program. 

As school budgets were slashed in the wake of the Great Recession little more than a decade ago, the federal government funneled billions of dollars toward school improvement as part of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009.

With the global economy entering a recession brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, University of Washington College of Education Professor Min Sun says policymakers today would do well to learn from the past.