Chalkbeat

Free Newark summer reading program still has open seats for parents to sign up their kids

2026-08-04T20:30:15+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to get the latest news about the city’s public school system delivered to your inbox.

The national literacy nonprofit Reading Partners came to Newark two years ago to help tackle the city’s literacy gap.

This past school year, the group recruited 500 volunteer tutors to provide one-on-one support to Newark’s youngest readers online or in person across city libraries. The tutors were trained in research-backed methods like the science of reading to prepare for the summer sessions.

But only about 200 students signed up for tutoring, and program leaders say making parents aware of the program has been a challenge.

The Reading Partners program provides reading support to kindergarten through fourth grade students and enrolls students on a rolling basis. The group said there’s still time to join, and any parent can sign their child up for one or two 45-minute tutoring sessions per week this summer or throughout the school year. The summer reading program ends Aug. 31 and in-person and virtual tutoring during the school year restarts on Sept. 28.

Daniela Palacios, the founder of Para KIDS! set a goal to sign up at least 15 students for its first bilingual summer camp. She got eight. At the Van Buren Branch Library in the East Ward, Christopher, a rising fifth grader at Ann Street School whose family is from Brazil, spelled out the word “generous” in English and Spanish.

Three years ago, only 19% of public school third graders read on grade level, prompting Mayor Ras Baraka to launch a 10-point action plan built on community partnerships, local initiatives, and city events. Reading Partners and Para KIDS! are among the organizations struggling to get students through the door for tutoring despite the clear need. Both say filling seats has been difficult this summer.

Last spring, only 34% of Newark Public Schools’ students in grades 3-9 passed the state’s English Language Arts test. Although that was an improvement from levels right after the pandemic, students are still behind. City leaders continue to raise concerns about low reading rates, but if programs built to close literacy gaps can’t fill their own seats, the challenge isn’t a lack of resources. It’s getting families to use them.

Naima Ricks, managing director of partnerships and growth for Reading Partners, said part of the challenge is that the organization is fairly new to the city. Reading Partners came to Newark in 2024 with funding from the GreenLight Fund Greater Newark, which recruited the national nonprofit to fill the city’s need to offer free, personalized tutoring outside of schools, said Tish Johnson, the fund’s executive director.

Ricks isn’t sure why more parents aren’t signing their kids up. Summer can be a tough enrollment time for academic programs nationwide as vacations and work schedules can make it difficult to convince parents and their kids to practice their reading skills during the summer months. Lower-income families are also less likely to participate in summer learning opportunities or day camps due to cost and a lack of awareness about what’s available.

Mateo, a rising first grader at Lafayette Street School, is reading with Mideademide Johnson, a junior at Penn State University, at the Reading Partners program at Newark Public Library Van Buren Branch in Newark, N.J.

“We’re still figuring out the best ways to connect with parents and other caregivers to get their students signed up for tutoring,” Ricks said.

Reading Partners recruits college students, retirees, and anyone who wants to support students learning to read. The program started a new partnership with the Newark library this year and expanded to all city libraries this summer. It tutored 300 students this past school year and has roughly 200 this summer, according to Ricks. But that’s just a fraction of the more than 20,000 kindergarten through fourth graders enrolled in Newark charter and public schools in 2025, according to the New Jersey Children’s Foundation data explorer tool.

Palacios, a Newark Public Schools alum and Columbia University graduate, thinks the current political landscape could be a factor. She started the bilingual camp to help students embrace their multicultural backgrounds and practice English and Spanish with their peers. She specifically targeted East Ward families for the program, an area where the majority of residents speak Spanish or Portuguese.

But ongoing immigration enforcement in the East Ward has made some parents afraid to visit the library at all, Palacios said. Just last week, three staff members at the Van Buren Branch library told Chalkbeat they saw Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials arrest someone in front of the building.

Ariana, a rising fifth grader who’s homeschooled, said she loves the bilingual summer camp because it helps her practice her Portuguese so she’s able to talk with her grandparents, who don’t speak English.

A student is reading with her tutor at the Reading Partners program at Newark Public Library Van Buren Branch in Newark, N.J.

Like Reading Partners, Palacios shared flyers about the program, posted videos on social media, contacted school principals in the area, and tapped East Ward Councilman Michael Silva to raise awareness about her program. She still fell short of her enrollment goal.

“I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity here in Newark, and it’s just a matter of making (parents) feel comfortable during these times, like feeling like, oh, this was made for me,” Palacios said.

Johnson, of the GreenLight Fund Greater Newark, wants to find better ways to connect families to literacy support and other resources like housing and food assistance.

“I think there’s just a lack of knowledge that these things exist and a lack of coordination to help families get access to multiple services,” Johnson said.

Maylin Vargas said her mom wanted more reading opportunities for her brother Mateo, a rising first grader at Lafayette who attends Reading Partners, this summer. Her mom learned about the program from another parent at school. Mateo doesn’t struggle much with reading, so he wasn’t eligible for mandatory summer school, but his mom wanted him to keep up reading skills during the summer.

Paula White, executive director of JerseyCAN, a statewide education advocacy organization, and member of Reading Partners’ advisory board, said getting parents to understand the importance of tutoring is key to filling seats for summer reading programs. She wants to move up the timeline for releasing state test results and integrate those scores into report cards so parents can better understand their child’s performance and needs.

“I do think that it really starts with an engaged parent community,” White said. “So that means making sure that parents are engaged and educated to the greatest extent possible around what the curriculum demands are and where their child sits relative to those demands.”

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Research on AI tutoring ran into a problem: Most students wouldn’t use it

2026-06-17T18:16:17+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

A group of Stanford University researchers started with one question: Could a human tutor providing motivation and support get students to spend more time working with an AI literacy tutor?

The answer turned out be yes — but only between one and four minutes more per week. Many students never logged on at all.

That left the researchers with a different set of questions.

“A key finding that we weren’t even meaning to test is that having access to this AI tutor isn’t the same as using it,” said Carly Robinson, the lead author on the study released Wednesday and the director of research for the SCALE Initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

Robinson said this doesn’t necessarily mean AI tutoring doesn’t work. “We never really got close enough to the dosage needed to find out.”

The study adds to a very limited research base for AI tools in education as many school districts are looking for ways to maintain or increase tutoring that costs less than hiring people to do the work. It also aligns with the experience of Khanmigo founder Sal Khan, who recently acknowledged that students didn’t engage much with the AI tutor he initially hoped would revolutionize education.

Robinson and her colleagues worked with two school districts serving high-poverty populations using the same AI learning platform in different tutoring settings. Neither the districts nor the learning platform are named in the study.

In one school district, elementary children were supposed to use the literacy tutor during homework time in an afterschool program. In the other, early elementary students were supposed to use the AI tutor during class time.

The learning platform provider said that students would show improvement in their reading skills with at least 30 minutes of use a week. The goal was for students to complete two 30-minute sessions each week.

Students were randomly assigned to either work independently with the AI tutor or with guidance from a specially trained person — afterschool program staff in one district and middle school students who were strong readers in the other — who could provide motivation and tech support.

Other research has found that the relationship between tutors and students can be a key factor in tutoring effectiveness. Researchers wanted to know if having human support would increase engagement with the tool and raise test scores over the course of the school year. They also thought they might learn that students working independently made more progress because they spent more time on the platform and less time chatting.

But it turned out both groups of students barely used the platform, and having a human tutor didn’t increase the likelihood that students would log on.

Students who did use the platform spent about 13 minutes in a session in the afterschool setting and almost 26 minutes in a session when they used it in class, enough time to probably derive some benefit, Robinson said.

But the low rate of participation meant students in the afterschool setting averaged only about two minutes a week on the platform when they worked independently and three minutes when working with a tutor. In the other district, younger students working independently in class averaged a little more than five minutes a week on the platform, which increased to almost 10 minutes a week when they worked with a tutor.

There was no meaningful difference in the reading scores of the two groups.

The bigger finding, Robinson said, was that many students didn’t log on most weeks. And those that did log on were more likely to already be higher performing and not identified for special education.

Researchers don’t know why students didn’t use the platform. Perhaps some didn’t find it engaging, or perhaps teachers directed students to spend their time in other ways. Those other activities may have been beneficial, Robinson said. The study didn’t compare outcomes for students who used the platform and who didn’t use the platform.

Robinson said she still sees enormous potential for digital tools to provide personalized instruction at scale. But before districts pay for a license, administrators need to look at more than whether there’s evidence a particular AI tool improves student learning.

“The challenge isn’t just building good AI tools,” Robinson said. “It’s really getting students to use them, and that seems to take the same type of intentional design that we’ve learned matters with other ed tech interventions and tutoring.”

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

3 ways AI will (and won’t) change schools

2025-11-04T15:49:53+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up to attend our first virtual event focusing on new insights from learning loss data with Emily Oster.

At a recent education technology conference in New York City — where companies were hawking their products and speakers were predicting great benefits from artificial intelligence — one attendee offered something of a heretical perspective.

“Right now, as it is, AI has had a net negative impact on students,” said Dacia Toll, co-founder of Coursemojo, an AI-powered teaching assistant.

Later, Toll told me that she’s convinced that there are many potential benefits of AI in education.

“It’s going to be a complex situation — there are going to be bad use cases, good use cases,” she said. “The jury is out on what the net impact will be.”

At this moment, our understanding of the impact of generative AI in schools is muddy and uncertain. But some clear realities are emerging. These are my three theories for what AI will and won’t mean in classrooms over the next several years.

Cheating is a big problem and it’s not going away

Ask a high school student or their teachers about AI, and there’s a good chance they will say that an alarming number of teenagers are using AI to write their essays, solve their math problems, and finish their assignments.

In one recent survey, fully 100% of high school principals said they were concerned about “academic integrity” challenges created by AI. A majority reported being “very concerned.”

Cheating is difficult to quantify, so it’s hard to prove there’s been an increase in it. AI advocates emphasize that cheating is not a new phenomenon. What is new is that generative AI has made it easier and therefore more tempting.

“The degree to which you can relatively easily find students who will tell you that they are doing complete assignments — and large numbers of them — entirely with this machine is different,” says Justin Reich, an MIT professor and ed-tech expert. He recently hosted a podcast series called “The Homework Machine” based on interviews with dozens of teachers and students. The theme: Many students are taking advantage of this innovative new cheating tool.

The implications are troubling. Some students are simply doing less work and learning less. Even a majority of high school students in one poll said they fear AI will harm their critical thinking.

In turn, classroom trust may be falling as teachers become worried about cheating and students fear being falsely accused. “You become a paranoid person. You distrust every single thing your students give you,” Sara Falls, a high school English teacher, explained on one of Reich’s podcast episodes.

It’s hard to see a clear way out of this conundrum. Efforts by teachers to monitor misuse lead to counterefforts to avoid detection, often with the help of sophisticated cheating tools.

Many teachers want more support, but most say they’re getting little. In the next few years we will see if schools start creating systematic strategies to combat cheating or if teachers continue to be left largely on their own.

AI will become a ubiquitous teaching assistant

Sandy Mangarella, a high school English teacher in New Jersey, used to spend upwards of an hour apiece on letters of recommendation for her students. Now, with artificial intelligence a letter takes only a few minutes.

“I write really good ones now, even better than I used to,” she says. Mangarella, who has been teaching for 44 years, typically uses AI multiple times a week for other things too, like brainstorming lesson ideas or getting a second take on a student essay.

Teachers are text generation machines. They are constantly drafting worksheets, classroom newsletters, special education plans, rubrics, presentations, notes home, quizzes, essay outlines, exit tickets, take-home work packets, and more. What generative AI is very good at is producing text.

AI is not yet a daily part of the work life for most teachers. Only 1 in 8 use it on a weekly basis for teaching-related work, according to a recent poll. About half don’t use it at all. Yet the experiences of Mangarella and others suggest that as more teachers get comfortable with the technology, AI will become a common, perhaps universal assistant for educators.

This comes with some risks. Teachers themselves could engage in the “cognitive offloading” we fear for students, using less care putting together lessons or relying on lower-quality material. Some advocates also worry about bias, particularly if AI is drafting special education plans.

But the upside of AI as a teacher’s assistant is substantial: It could free up teacher time — one of the most valuable commodities in schools.

AI will never be a supertutor (but it could help some students)

At last month’s ed-tech conference in New York City, OpenAI’s Vice President and General Manager of Education Leah Belsky touted the great benefits of tutoring. “We all aspire for every student to have that one-on-one tutoring experience,” she said. “ChatGPT and AI could one day make that possible.” This could be incredibly impactful, Belsky said, citing a 1984 study that claimed tutoring could vault the average student to the 98th percentile of performance.

This paper, by the late University of Chicago professor Benjamin Bloom, has been the touchstone of technologists for decades. The hope has been that technology can replicate the value of a human tutor at a fraction of the cost. I learned about this work several years ago when computer-based “personalized learning” advocates, like Mark Zuckerberg, were citing it.

Yet those aspiring for such dramatic learning gains from AI are likely to be disappointed. This was the case for personalized learning enthusiasts.

Through a spokesperson, Belsky of OpenAI declined to comment for this piece.

The problem is that Bloom’s results were wildly unrealistic, as detailed in a 2024 Education Next article. Gains of such size have not been widely replicated on math and reading tests. Bloom only found these improvements when applied to the novel subjects of cartography and probability. Modern studies of large-scale human tutoring programs show it is one of the most effective strategies for boosting learning — but results are about a tenth the size of what Bloom reported.

It’s risky for AI advocates to tout massive potential gains. “If that’s the bar, then the current AI capabilities are not set up to achieve that goal,” says Toll of Coursemojo, noting that AI is not as good as a human tutor. Still, she believes the bar shouldn’t be set unrealistically high and that the technology does have the potential to boost student learning.

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

A grant for Indiana families to buy tutoring is stopping sooner than expected. Will it come back?

2025-02-21T12:00:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Indiana’s free daily newsletter to keep up with Indianapolis Public Schools, Marion County’s township districts, and statewide education news.

A $15 million program that gave thousands of Indiana families cash for tutoring will wind down about a month earlier than anticipated due to unexpected heavy use that sapped its available funding – leaving students without extra support ahead of state testing.

Indiana Learns was a first-in-the-nation initiative that gave federal COVID relief funding directly to families for tutoring services to catch up after pandemic disruption starting in 2022. The program, administered by Indianapolis-based nonprofit The Mind Trust, expanded after another legislative change in 2023 to provide more tutoring funds, reach more students, and also allow tutoring during the school day. That law also changed how the money was distributed, from a one-time grant of $1,000 to an amount “subject to available funding.”

Operators hope the program will return with new state and grant funding next year, but funding from the next state budget is not guaranteed.

Like other tutoring programs around the country, Indiana Learns always expected to need new funding sources as ESSER came to an end. In a presentation to the State Board of Education in November, Mind Trust Executive Director Brandon Brown said the program had enough funding to last until the next state testing window.

But a notice to providers sent Feb. 14 and shared with Chalkbeat said the program would actually wind down on March 15. Only students with funds remaining in their accounts will be able to use tutoring services through that date, and new funds would no longer be added to student accounts.

“We wanted to go up to the start of ILEARN, but the program was pretty popular with families and we didn’t know how much would be allocated to the program,” said Kateri Whitley, senior communications director at The Mind Trust. The summative state testing window begins in April — some schools have been piloting “checkpoints” in earlier months.

Until this point, the program had replenished student accounts, Whitley said. That meant students who had been attending tutoring and whose accounts were depleted to a certain threshold would see their accounts replenished to $1,000.

Not being able to predict how many student accounts would be replenished – combined with the popularity of the program – means that it needed to end early, Whitley said. The program also does not want to spend all of its funding this year; it’s not clear how much remains.

“There’s a high likelihood it will continue and we don’t want to spend down every single cent this program year,” Whitley said.

But the decision has caused turmoil among schools and tutoring providers where the program was in use.

Several educators who spoke to Chalkbeat anonymously for fear of retaliation said the end date of the program came as a surprise and will leave students without tutoring support ahead of state testing. Furthermore, they said the lack of warning means that students who don’t have funds left in their accounts effectively have already had their final tutoring sessions, potentially without a final assessment of their skills, or a goodbye to their tutors.

The program had 23,000 enrolled students as of November last year. To receive the funds, students had to be in grades 3-8 at a public or private school, qualify for free or reduced price lunch, and score below proficiency in either math or English language arts.

As of Thursday, there were 15,000 students enrolled.

Students who still have funds in their accounts can use them for sessions until March 15. The Mind Trust did not say by deadline how many students still had funds to use, or how many students had had their accounts replenished.

Future funding sources uncertain

The program has paused for the summer in previous years in order to preserve tutoring funds for when they were most needed.

Whitley said The Mind Trust expects the program to return in the 2025-26 school year after the March pause, likely through funding in the next state budget. She also pointed to new grant funding from Accelerate, a national nonprofit, earmarked to keep the program going.

Lawmakers passed a draft of the budget Thursday. While it does not include a specific line item for Indiana Learns, it does give the Indiana Department of Education an $86 million Freedom and Opportunity block grant meant to support initiatives that improve student learning recovery.

In a statement, department representatives did not answer whether any of these funds would be used to support Indiana Learns in the future, highlighting instead other priorities to expand the new state testing checkpoint pilot and recruit teachers.

“As budget discussions continue, we will work with Governor Braun and the General Assembly to continue to measure return on investment and determine the best way to double-down on those initiatives that … positively move the needle for students,” the statement said.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

NAEP results: Tennessee students buck grim national trends on nation’s report card

2025-01-29T05:09:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free newsletter to keep up with statewide education policy and Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Tennessee students held their ground on a major national test in a year when average student test scores declined nationwide.

Results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, released Wednesday, show that average test scores in Tennessee increased slightly in fourth and eighth grade reading and math, compared with 2022, though the gains were not statistically significant.

Tennessee’s latest post-pandemic results stood in contrast to declines seen nationwide and in many other states. And Tennessee students scored three to four points higher than the national average in math and one to two points higher in reading.

“Tennessee students did well relative to other states, and we did better than some of our neighbors,” Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds said.

“We didn’t move backwards, we moved a little bit forward, and we expect to do better next year,” added state Rep. Mark White, of Memphis, who chairs a key House education committee and also serves on the NAEP governing board.

Math scores outpace reading scores

Tennessee has launched numerous initiatives aimed at bolstering early literacy, but the latest NAEP showed the state’s most dramatic improvements came in math.

In fourth grade math, 42% of students scored proficient or advanced, an increase of 6 percentage points from 2022. The state was one of 29 jurisdictions that posted scores similar to 2019, before the pandemic. Only Alabama had average scores higher than 2019. Nationwide, average scores are down three points, and 22 states had declines.

In eighth grade math, Tennessee’s proficiency rate also grew, while the national average declined. Tennessee was one of just two jurisdictions with similar scores to 2019. Average scores dropped 9 points.

In fourth grade reading, Tennessee was one of 47 states with no statistical change from 2022. Nonetheless, its scores were up slightly, whereas the nationwide average dropped by two points from 2022 and by five points from 2019.

The small increases in eighth grade reading scores were not statistically different from 2022 or 2019, but again, the small increase stood in contrast to nationwide averages that dropped 5 points since 2019. Tennessee also saw more notable increases in scores among higher-performing students in the 75th percentile.

The relatively strong showing in math, according to state officials, could be tied to the full return to in-person learning, which studies show is especially important for math instruction; Tennessee’s 2021 adoption of new math standards; and the subsequent rollout of math curriculum to align with those standards.

They expect that trend to continue with passage of a 2024 state law spotlighting more analysis of and support for math instruction.

Tennessee was an early adopter of pandemic-era interventions

Tennessee has been held up as a model both for how it managed federal pandemic relief spending — quickly steering money into tutoring, summer learning camps, and afterschool programs aimed at students who had fallen furthest behind — and for its intense focus on early literacy. State test results from 2024 show students there making steady progress since 2021.

The challenge now will be to maintain progress and deploy state funds to replace federal pandemic relief aid that expired last year.

“We still have that obligation at the state level to continue to support districts in as many ways as possible,” said Reynolds, the state’s education chief. She cited free professional development resources provided to school systems by her department as one example.

“Local school officials also knew that the money was ending, so they’ve been building in their own sustainability practices to keep the work going,” she said.

White, the state lawmaker and NAEP official, said the state’s controversial 2021 third-grade reading intervention and retention law was a key part of the mix. It pushed children whose families might have opted for summer breaks into summer learning programs and motivated schools to increase support for struggling readers.

“If a child is not reading proficiently in third grade, we want to really understand why and not just pass them on,” he said.

State officials already are digging into the latest NAEP data on how various student groups performed — to study how they can offer better support.

Tennessee’s growing population of English language learners saw across-the-board improvement, while students with disabilities showed slight decreases.

The national results track with test score trends from the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, which in 2024 showed that students continued to improve from post-pandemic lows.

The alignment of national and state data is important, said Amy Owen, the state’s senior education policy director, because “it shows that our students will be able to compete with students from across the country when they look at post-secondary and career opportunities.”

“We’re seeing steady increases, which is significant when you think about where our kids were during COVID,” added Reynolds. “Our fourth graders were kindergartners then, our eighth graders were fourth graders.”

Memphis district opts out of separate NAEP assessment

Since 2018, NAEP has also released results for Memphis Shelby County Schools, one of roughly two dozen large urban districts participating in national math and reading tests through the Trial Urban District Assessment program, which is designed to help those districts measure student performance against districts in other large cities.

But last year, leaders of the Memphis district chose not to participate in the program.

White, who represents part of Memphis, said the lack of participation represented a “leadership breakdown” as the district cycled through superintendents.

“That’s sad that we don’t have their scores,” he said. “We can’t continue that trend.”

What is NAEP?

Not every Tennessee fourth-grader or eighth-grader took the national test when the federal government administered the assessments in early 2024.

NAEP tests a nationally representative sample of students in every state. In Tennessee, each of the four assessments was taken by about 1,700-1,800 students in 80-90 schools.

The results, published as the nation’s report card, allow comparisons across states and are an important marker for showing how students are doing over time.

The last three testing cycles happened in 2019, 2022, and most recently in 2024, providing an especially helpful comparison of what students knew before the pandemic and how much they have rebounded from COVID-related learning disruptions.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Few third- and fourth-graders are being retained under Tennessee reading law, data shows

2024-11-22T01:14:36+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free daily newsletter to keep up with statewide education policy and Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Some 60% of Tennessee third-grade students scored below proficiency in English language arts on 2024 state tests. Fewer than than 1% of them were retained under the state’s reading and retention law, and about 2.5% are no longer enrolled in public schools, according to new data.

Among fourth graders who had been promoted by receiving tutoring during the 2023-24 academic year under the same law, just over 1% were held back this school year, while at least 4% have left their public school.

The findings, presented by Tennessee’s chief academic officer to the State Board of Education on Thursday, show some of the effects of Tennessee’s 2021 reading intervention and retention law aimed at accelerating learning after the pandemic.

The controversial statute was pushed by Gov. Bill Lee, who said he wanted to draw a hard line to “stop the cycle of passing without preparation.” The legislature has since approved several revisions to loosen the policies and provide more pathways to promotion for students who don’t test as proficient readers.

State leaders are ‘encouraged’ by tutoring and summer program data

The big question is whether students are becoming better readers with the state’s interventions.

That includes summer programming, which began in each school system in 2021 to mitigate the effects of disruptions to schooling during the pandemic. About 121,000 students went that first year, and participation has leveled off to about 90,000 in subsequent years.

Chief Academic Officer Kristy Brown, in her presentation to the board, said attendance rates improved for recent summer programs, indicating that parents are finding value in them.

As far as academics, she said: “What we’re really seeing is the effects of decreased summer slide, or the lack of it, for students who are participating, compared to those who are not.”

Summer slide, referring to when students’ academic proficiency regresses during summer break, is a common phenomenon, especially for historically disadvantaged populations.

As for required small group tutoring, which younger students receive weekly during the school year if they don’t meet expectations on state tests, Brown said students testing in the bottom level, called “below” proficiency, are moving in the right direction.

In addition, almost half of the 12,260 fourth graders who received required tutoring in 2023-24 showed improvement as the year progressed. Over 14% of them scored as proficient on their TCAPs last spring, and nearly 33% met the threshold for showing adequate growth based on a state formula.

The data is the first available for fourth-graders who started receiving additional support after scoring below proficiency in the third grade.

“To finally have the numbers — to see that the needle appears to have been moved in a positive way like that — I was glad to see,” said Ryan Holt, a member of the state board.

Several other board members also said they were “encouraged” by the data.

Brown, the state’s academic chief, cautioned that gains can’t be traced at this point to any single part of the state’s reading interventions.

“It’s a combination of the things that we’ve done,” she said, “with professional learning for teachers, and summer programming, and tutoring, and those things customized for those students to see the gains that I think we’ve seen in Tennessee.”

Many educators and parents have been less enthusiastic.

The high-stakes testing was well-intended, they say, but it’s taken an emotional toll on many of Tennessee’s youngest students, affecting their self-confidence and their feelings toward school.

The legislature’s most recent revisions to the law were intended to give parents and educators more input into retention decisions.

Many students facing retention used alternative pathways to promotion

After the 2023-24 school year, most of the nearly 44,000 third graders who were at risk of retention used other pathways to promotion.

Nearly 27% were exempted for various reasons, including having a disability or suspected disability that impacts their reading; being an English language learner with less than two years of ELA instruction; and having been previously retained.

Over 4% retook the test at the end of the academic year and scored as proficient.

Others were promoted through a combination of tutoring and summer program participation.

For the 12,260 fourth graders who participated in tutoring last school year, over 14% scored as proficient on the state’s assessment in the spring.

Over 32% met the state’s “adequate growth” measure that’s tailored to each student. It’s based on testing measurements that the state uses to predict the probability that a student can become proficient by the eighth grade, when they take their last TCAP tests.

And nearly 44% of at-risk fourth graders were promoted by a new “conference” pathway that lawmakers approved on the last day of the 2024 legislative session. It allows the student to be promoted if their parents, teacher, and principal decide collectively that it’s in the child’s best interest.

Any fourth grader promoted to the fifth grade via the conference pathway must receive tutoring in the fifth grade.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Hundreds of DPSCD students could get $2,000 for attending literacy tutoring

2024-10-28T20:40:08+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Detroit’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and Michigan education policy.

More than a thousand students have signed up for a new tutoring program in the Detroit school district that will pay the teens $2,000 for attending.

Chalkbeat reported on the program in August as the district was finalizing details. The financial incentive is intended to make staying after school for literacy tutoring attractive to students, particularly those who need to work after school to earn money.

When the program was announced earlier in the school year, 3,000 students expressed interest, but Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the number “has declined once we sent out the actual schedule and made it clear that students had to attend all of the sessions.”

On Monday morning, Vitti said 900 officially signed up for the tutoring session that begins Nov. 11 and runs for 11 weeks. Another 165 signed up for the session that begins in January. Students can only attend one of the sessions.

Vitti said he is not surprised by the level of interest.

“I know we need to think differently about financial incentives,” Vitti said. “I have been stating this for some time now but did not have the flexibility with our funding to do it.”

Every DPSCD high school will offer the tutoring. At locations with more demand than available slots, preference will be given to students with lower literacy scores on the PSAT and SAT.

The program launches at a time when the district is working to improve literacy levels. As of spring 2024, 53.9% of district eighth graders read two or more grades below reading level.

Here are some key details:

There are strict rules about attendance for the tutoring

Tutoring will take place Monday through Thursday for 11 weeks, with a couple of exceptions related to holidays. It begins Nov. 11 and runs through Feb. 11. A second cycle of the tutoring runs from Jan. 6-April 3.

Students must attend all sessions, and they must be present for the regular school day. They’ll receive $1,000 after the first 20 sessions are completed and another $1,000 after the final 20 sessions are completed.

If a student misses a day, they’ll be removed from the program.

What if a student gets sick or has an emergency?

“Perhaps we can work on one day make-up sessions, but with this being a paid and voluntary opportunity, we need to have higher standards,” Vitti said. “In addition, to gain the benefit of the tutoring, students need to attend all of the sessions or the intervention will not work, which negates the reason to offer it. Lastly, we have a tight timeline to simply offer what we are offering with the number of sessions that is required. We don’t have a lot of time for make-up sessions.”

Tutors will be familiar faces

Students will receive assistance from trained teachers as well as academic interventionists, who have become a key part of the district’s academic improvement efforts, Vitti said.

“You need extensive training to offer the tutoring,” Vitti said.

Measuring success will be key

The district intends to monitor the success of the program and may expand it beyond this school year, “depending on how the year goes,” Vitti said.

The district will look to see if the program improves school attendance, grades, and the results of tests such as the SAT and end-of-course exams.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee fourth graders show big gains on state literacy tests as third graders hold steady

2024-06-13T17:50:48+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free daily newsletter to keep up with statewide education policy and Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Tennessee fourth graders showed significant improvement on state tests for English language arts, while third grade scores were mostly steady after achieving historic gains last year, state officials said Thursday.

Fourth-grade proficiency increased by 2.9 percentage points to an overall rate of 46.4%, while third-grade proficiency improved by a half percentage point to 40.9% on tests used by the state to gauge reading levels under the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP.

The rates are the highest since the state raised its academic standards in 2010 after receiving an “F” in 2007 from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for low academic expectations and for truth in advertising on its K-12 public education performance.

The state education department also reported fewer fourth graders scored “below expectations,” the bottom category for gauging proficiency.

However, the third grade scores put about three-fifths of those students at risk of being held back under Tennessee’s 2021 reading and retention law. Most of them still may advance, however, based on do-over test results and participation in various intervention options.

Last year, of the 60% of third graders who fell short of the state’s proficiency benchmark, only 1.2% were held back due to interventions, exemptions, and an appeals process.

In Memphis-Shelby County Schools, the state’s largest district, officials reported students made gains in both pivotal grades, with the most pronounced improvement by third graders.

ELA proficiency went up 3 percentage points to 26.6% for third graders and by 1.8 percentage points to 28.5% for fourth graders. But new Superintendent Marie Feagins said the improvements weren’t enough.

“Literacy is the anchor to the success that our 110,000 students deserve to experience,” Feagins said in a statement. “Thus, these data further support the need to direct more district resources directly to classrooms, with a target emphasis on a comprehensive literacy approach at every grade level.”

In a news release, Gov. Bill Lee credited the state’s comprehensive literacy strategy, including early investments in tutoring to help struggling readers improve after the pandemic disrupted schooling in 2020. Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds praised the hard work of students, educators, and families.

“As we continue our work to ensure that all Tennessee students can read at grade level, we remain committed to supporting teachers and empowering families with multiple pathways to achievement so every student can thrive in their academic journey,” Lee said.

The education department did not publicly release the data behind its report as it usually does. Spokesperson Brian Blackley said it will be published soon but could not give a specific date.

Impacts on retention decisions are uncertain

Data on how many third and fourth graders will be held back as a result of the scoring won’t be released until late summer before school starts, under tougher retention policies approved by the legislature after the pandemic.

“There are a lot of different pathways for student promotion, and some of those haven’t even occurred yet,” Blackley said, citing summer learning programs and third grade TCAP retakes that are still being scored.

A parent, guardian, or educator of a third grader who scored just below proficiency also can submit an appeal to the education department until June 28 based on certain conditions.

For students completing fourth grade who are at risk of retention, the state is to release its calculations by July 1 on whether they showed enough improvement to advance. If not, the parent or guardian must meet with their child’s teacher and principal to make that call. But many educators and parents have already been meeting to discuss those options and make plans.

A summer learning camp is in session at Rocks Spring Elementary School in Kingsport, Tennessee.

Low literacy rates have long bedeviled Tennessee

Third grade is considered a critical year for reading, because literacy is foundational to all subsequent learning. But reading scores have historically been mostly stagnant in Tennessee, with only about a third of the state’s third graders meeting the law’s high threshold for proficiency based on state tests.

For several decades, the state tried various strategies to move the needle, and with limited success.

After the pandemic, the state invested $100 million in COVID relief and federal grant funding to provide school systems with optional reading resources and support.

And during a special session called by Lee in 2021 to address pandemic-related learning losses, the legislature passed several laws to jumpstart the state’s literacy work. Among them: prioritizing reading improvements and investments in grades K-3, creating new tutoring and summer school programs, training teachers on the “science of reading,” including an emphasis on phonics, and — most controversial of all — strengthening retention requirements for grades 3 and 4 based on the results of TCAP testing in English language arts.

After getting significant pushback from parents and educators, lawmakers have revised the state’s retention laws several times to allow more students in those grades to advance.

Last month, the governor signed legislation to let each fourth grader’s parents, teacher, and principal decide collectively whether a student should be held back due to a second straight year of low reading scores, even after a year of tutoring.

The department expects to release statewide and district-level TCAP data in all testing subjects by the end of the summer.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Changes to Tennessee’s 4th-grade reading law pass after compromise on retention policy

2024-04-25T22:01:13+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free daily newsletter to keep up with statewide education policy and Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Parents of Tennessee fourth graders would have input on whether their children get held back because of low reading test scores, under compromise legislation that’s headed to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk.

The legislation also provides additional tutoring to students who advance to the fifth grade, even if they didn’t test as proficient readers or show adequate improvement in grades three and four.

The Senate and House agreed on the provisions Thursday to address longstanding concerns about Lee’s 2021 reading and retention law, which threatens to hold back an estimated 6,000 struggling fourth-grade readers.

Under the current law, which Lee proposed, fourth graders who don’t score well enough on state tests have to repeat fourth grade, and receive no additional learning supports and resources during that year. But legislators said that wasn’t their intent when they voted to strengthen retention requirements for third- and fourth-graders during a special session to deal with disruptions to schooling from the pandemic.

The governor signaled later that he will sign the bill.

The legislature’s vote came on the final day of a 2024 legislative session that began in January — and nearly two weeks after students began testing under the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP, which the state uses to determine reading proficiency.

Educators and families called the timing of the bill’s passage ironic, given that lawmakers have received pushback about the law for several years.

“They could have saved many fourth-grade students and their parents a whole lot of anxiety if they’d passed this earlier,” said Michael Ramsey, an instructional coach for Grainger County Schools, near Knoxville.

Different versions of the bill passed last week out of the House and Senate. When neither side backed down, they turned to negotiators to reach a compromise.

Both chambers were in agreement about directing the child’s parent or guardian to meet with the teacher and principal to discuss whether it’s in the child’s best interest to be promoted or held back. But on Thursday, negotiators added that the parent won’t make the final call. The majority will rule.

The final bill also sets TCAP scores as the only promotion criteria, and tutoring as the only required intervention for advancing.

Tennessee 4th graders await test scores — and outcome of debate that could hold back thousands

The House bill, sponsored by Rep. Gary Hicks of Rogersville, would have let schools take into account the results of a local benchmark test too. And it would have allowed families to choose between participating in a summer learning program or tutoring in fifth grade if promoted.

But in a concession, the Senate, where the bill was sponsored by Dawn White of Murfreesboro, agreed to drop its insistence that the changes take place for only two years. That provision likely would have required lawmakers to revisit the law in 2026.

This is not the first time the legislature has revised the law.

Last year, when the statute’s retention provision kicked in for third graders, lawmakers widened criteria to include both TCAP and benchmark test results to determine which third graders are at risk of being held back.

Third grade is considered a critical year for reading because literacy is the basis for all subsequent learning.

But there’s a growing consensus among Tennessee policymakers that third grade is too late to identify and help struggling readers.

Last month, in a rare action, the state Board of Education approved a resolution asking the legislature to refocus the state’s intervention efforts on grades as early as kindergarten.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with Lee signaling he’ll sign the bill.

Intensive tutoring is great for academics. Now there’s evidence it can boost attendance.

2024-03-22T10:00:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

Twelve-year-old Ethen likes spending time with his math tutors — and not always for reasons related to math.

They crack jokes and play chess with him when he finishes his work early. He likes meeting with them in the library, where it’s easier to ask questions without being talked over. And when he’s had a rough day, he can count on his tutors to cheer him up.

“That’s something good for me because I get to finally see someone that’s happy to see me,” said Ethen, a sixth grader at Cardozo Education Campus in Washington, D.C. “Their smile makes me smile.”

Lots of research has shown that intensive tutoring is one of the best ways to help students improve academically. And it’s become a go-to strategy to help kids who missed a lot of instruction during the pandemic. But a new study suggests high-dosage tutoring can boost something else, too: attendance.

Preliminary research recently released by Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator, which is conducting various tutoring studies, found that D.C. students who participated in an intensive tutoring program were more likely to show up to school on days they had a scheduled session. Overall, the likelihood they’d miss school on tutoring days fell by 7%, researchers found.

That finding is especially significant because many schools are still working to re-engage students and curb higher-than-usual absenteeism rates in the wake of the pandemic.

The study doesn’t answer why tutoring boosted attendance. One reason could be that many students, like Ethen, really like their tutors, who often serve as informal mentors and sometimes bond with students outside the classroom, too.

“The kids do feel really cared for,” said Christine Maffuccio, who oversees the high-impact tutoring program at Cardozo. She said that’s because tutors are at students’ side asking: “What do you need? What’s your first step?”

Another reason could be that, after the isolation of remote learning, tutoring reinforces the idea that “learning happens in the classroom, together.”

“As we’re kind of re-teaching kids how to be in school and why they should be engaged in class,” Maffuccio said, “I think the tutor’s presence in the class helps with that.”

The link between tutoring and attendance

Tutors are everywhere at Cardozo. On any given day, 25 tutors are working with students at the combined middle and high school. Many are college students or AmeriCorps members.

Now, many students don’t think twice about getting extra help because it’s become so common. Earlier this school year, 330 students were getting tutored at Cardozo — almost half of all students.

Shweta Raman, a tutor with Math Matters at The George Washington University, works with Debela, a sixth grader at Cardozo.

The work happening at Cardozo is part of a three-year, $33 million initiative run by D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education with the help of federal COVID relief funding. To receive grant funding, schools agreed to follow certain tutoring best practices, such as keeping tutoring groups small, regularly pairing students with the same tutor, and offering at least 90 minutes a week of intensive help. (A rigorous study of the program’s academic effects is ongoing, but officials say there’s been promising early evidence that the high-dosage tutoring has helped struggling students improve in math and reading.)

As part of that initiative, Stanford researchers looked at attendance records for nearly 4,500 students who received intensive math or reading tutoring during the 2022-23 school year. That included students from Cardozo and 141 other D.C. schools.

The better attendance on tutoring days added up to students getting, on average, an extra two days of instruction over the course of the school year — and as much as five days if the student had been absent a lot.

The effect was most pronounced for middle schoolers, whose likelihood of attending school rose by 11% on days they had a scheduled tutoring session.

The research didn’t look at what exactly made students want to come to school more. But researchers and school staff have some ideas, based on feedback they’ve collected from students and what they’ve observed.

They think the consistency and frequency with which students met with their tutors was likely important. Many students liked the more-personalized attention and wanted to spend time with their tutors. Others wanted to come to school more when they did better academically.

“That individual relationship that they’re building in that tutoring session seems like it could be one of those things” boosting engagement, said Nancy Waymack, who directs research partnerships for the National Student Support Accelerator. “If tutoring is having a positive academic effect on that student, they’re also more likely to be able to be successful in their day-to-day schoolwork, which would also make it more attractive to be at school.”

At Cardozo, Maffuccio has seen that students who may feel intimidated by the idea of asking their teacher for help will feel comfortable turning to a tutor, who may seem more like a big brother or an auntie.

“Students’ personalities come out a lot because not every sentence that they speak with their tutor has to be on task,” Maffuccio said. “I see joking and just kind of talking about their lives. That’s really an important part of the relationship-building — that’s how the space becomes safe for students to try and potentially fail.”

Some tutors end up connecting with students outside of class, too. One tutor who works with ninth graders in their English language arts class, for example, now coaches Cardozo’s middle school soccer team and has close relationships with lots of the players.

Tutors start from ‘a really upbeat, positive place’

Isabelle Jennings Pickering started tutoring at Cardozo in October. Jennings Pickering, known to students as Miss J, works mostly with ninth and 12th graders in their history classes, and she also helps students with their English and reading fluency.

As she gets to know a student, she starts by asking them personal questions — Do they play sports? What music are they listening to? — before diving into the academic material.

Lucia Vallejo, a tutor with Math Matters at The George Washington University, works with Cristian, a sixth grader at Cardozo.

Last semester, for example, when she started working with 17-year-old Miguel several times a week in his D.C. history class, she noticed that he loved talking about music and culture, but it was harder to talk about what was tripping him up in class.

So they “started from a really upbeat, positive place,” by chatting in Spanish and trading notes about their favorite Salvadoran foods. After that, it was easier to talk about academic “concerns and fears and sticky places,” Jennings Pickering said.

Speaking English can be scary for Miguel and many other students whose first language isn’t English, Jennings Pickering said. So she tries to make the tutoring session a safe place where students won’t shut down if she gently corrects their pronunciation.

“It’s often the thought that school isn’t for me, and reading isn’t for me, or English isn’t for me,” she said. “And fighting through that can be the biggest hurdle.”

When she’s able to help students see that learning just one new word or sentence is a success, “that’s huge,” she said.

Since he started working with a tutor, Miguel says he feels more comfortable in class and he’s getting his assignments done faster, too. And he’s proud he can now use the transitional words that Miss J taught him in his essays.

Among his go-tos?

“Therefore” and “however.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Biden education budget proposal includes $8 billion to extend pandemic recovery work like tutoring

2024-03-11T21:56:58+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

With a deadline looming to spend pandemic education dollars, the Biden administration has proposed making another $8 billion available to states and school districts to encourage better attendance and support academic recovery through tutoring and summer school.

The idea is a key component of President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for the U.S. Department of Education for fiscal year 2025, and represents an acknowledgment that schools still have a lot of work to do to recover from pandemic learning disruptions. The proposal comes a few months after the Biden administration called on schools to prioritize spending remaining COVID relief funding in these same areas.

The president’s budget proposal, announced Monday, also calls for modest increases to federal programs supporting high-poverty schools, students learning English as a second language, and students with disabilities. The administration also wants more money to support the Office for Civil Rights, and a $750 increase in the maximum Pell Grant award to help make college more affordable.

The White House budget plan will almost certainly not be adopted as written. It heads to a dysfunctional Congress that has careened between threats of government shutdown and short-term spending resolutions. The Republicans who control the House have been particularly hostile to Biden’s efforts to increase spending in several areas , including the Title I program that supports high-poverty schools.

Overall the budget proposal calls for more than $82 billion in discretionary spending for the education department, a 4% increase from this year.

Officials emphasized that this budget proposal complies with spending caps agreed to in last year’s bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act, while still investing in initiatives they hope will improve student success.

“When it comes to education, this budget is about raising the bar,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a call with reporters. “There are historic investments promised on top of historic investments delivered.”

Budget offers way to continue tutoring, attendance outreach

American schools received a combined $190 billion in assistance across three pandemic aid packages and have until September to spend any remaining money. Many schools have come to rely on their tutoring programs and want to keep them going after the pandemic aid expires.

But how they’ll fund them has been a big question. Some states have pledged added tutoring funds, but many districts would likely struggle to keep providing intensive help to students without making cuts elsewhere in their budget.

Similarly, the rate at which students are missing lots of school remains well above pre-pandemic levels in many parts of the country. Many schools launched home visit programs or hired staff specifically to work with kids who aren’t attending regularly, but school leaders say it will take additional time and investment to re-engage students and continue to boost attendance rates.

Expanded summer school programs were a popular investment during the pandemic, though they’ve been only moderately successful in helping students catch up. They’ve also been a common place school leaders have scaled back as COVID relief funding has wound down.

The proposed $8 billion in new money isn’t intended to replace pandemic assistance but would supplement current efforts. Officials envision a competitive grant program that would prioritize high-poverty schools, schools in communities especially hard-hit by COVID, and schools identified as needing academic improvement under federal accountability rules.

More money for English learners, civil rights investigations

Biden’s budget proposal calls for a 1.1% increase, or $200 million, to local grants in the Title I program, which provides money to low-income schools. Earlier in his administration, Biden called on Congress to double spending on Title I, but that hasn’t come to fruition. Congressional Republicans have questioned whether schools need more money after the pandemic stimulus, and last year, they sought to significantly cut Title I spending.

Cardona characterized this budget as defending public education from a “slash-and-burn” approach that would endanger the futures of American students.

Similarly, the White House is proposing a 1.4% increase in spending to support K-12 special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, as well as additional money for infants, toddlers, and preschool students with disabilities and grants to recruit special education teachers. Advocates have long called for the federal government to increase special education funding. Federal law lays out disabled students’ educational rights but leaves most of the costs to states and school districts.

The budget proposal calls for a roughly 5% increase or $50 million in new spending for Title III, which supports English learners.

Biden’s budget proposal also includes an extra $22 million, a 16% increase, for the Office for Civil Rights, which conducts investigations into allegations of discrimination in schools. Recently, the department announced it is looking into several incidents involving antisemitism or anti-Muslim discrimination at colleges and K-12 schools since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October.

The budget also calls for increased funding for preschool, student mental health, and community schools, which provide a wide range of services to support students and their families, as well as programs to encourage diverse candidates to enter the teaching profession.

The budget proposal includes a few cuts as well, including a 9% or $40 million reduction in a program that supports new charter schools and the replication of high-quality charter models.

Budget seeks to mitigate college costs

Biden’s budget blueprint would also increase the maximum Pell Grant award to $8,145, a 10% increase from current levels. Pell grants are available to college students from low-income families, and unlike loans, do not need to be repaid.

Budget analysts have warned of a looming shortfall in the Pell program after Congress expanded eligibility at the same time more students are heading back to college. The most recent continuing resolution to keep the federal government open walks back some of that recent expansion.

Advocates have argued that the maximum Pell award should be closer to $13,000 to keep pace with tuition increases and keep the door open to college for students of modest means.

The budget would increase funding for programs that allow high school students to earn college credit before graduating and for grants that help colleges support first-generation students and increase graduation rates.

The budget also calls for partnerships with states and tribes to make two years of community college free for students going to college for the first time and workers looking to change careers. Free community college was one of several education proposals that Biden ran on in 2020 that hasn’t gotten traction.

And the budget calls for more investment in the Office of Federal Student Aid amid a rocky rollout of a new federal financial aid form.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee reading law’s retention policies should start as early as kindergarten, state board says

2024-03-04T23:54:55+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free daily newsletter to keep up with statewide education policy and Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Tennessee’s top education policy board is urging Gov. Bill Lee and state lawmakers to refocus efforts to identify and help struggling readers on students in lower grades — as early as kindergarten — rather than waiting until third or fourth grade to intervene.

In a rare action, the state Board of Education unanimously approved a resolution Monday asking elected officials to revisit the state’s 2021 literacy law, which targeted third and fourth graders and strengthened retention rules for students who score poorly on state tests.

Over the past three years, the board has been working through the details and challenges of implementing the controversial law, which passed during a special legislative session called by the governor to address pandemic-related learning disruptions.

The law created popular summer learning camps and tutoring programs. It also included less popular provisions increasing the likelihood that third and fourth graders could be held back a grade eventually if they don’t perform well enough in English language arts under the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP.

Third grade, when Tennessee begins to give its students TCAP tests, is a critical year for reading proficiency, because literacy is considered key to all later learning.

The board’s request for the state to reconsider the law’s retention provision is based in part on new tools that Tennessee teachers are using to identify reading problems before the third grade.

“Retaining students in grades K-3 rather than grades 3-4 will ensure that students who are in the most need of additional reading support will have access to foundational literacy skills instruction at a critical point in their foundational literacy development should they be retained,” the resolution reads.

While years of research shows the overall costs and benefits of retaining students are unclear, the general consensus among researchers and educators is that the earlier a struggling student is retained, the better the outcomes for that student.

“Third grade is too late,” Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds told the board last month when members asked whether Tennessee’s reading law is targeting the right age group.

Additionally, Tennessee students in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade now take three tests annually to screen them for potential reading challenges. Data from those tests wasn’t available when the 2021 law passed, but it could be used now to trigger key supports, interventions, and retention decisions earlier in a student’s academic career, the resolution says.

Ryan Holt, who represents Nashville on the board and wrote the resolution, said the law had a good intent but needs a “course correction.”

Executive Director Sara Morrison agreed. “It pushes us in the right direction as a state to look at those earlier grades and use data responsibly to make decisions earlier than third grade, but allows for that backstop to remain in third grade where we have that consistent TCAP measure,” she said.

Thousands of third graders were at risk of being held back last year because of their TCAP scores, but ultimately only about 900 third graders, or 1.2% were retained — not significantly more than in an average school year — thanks to intervention options and an appeals process that many families took advantage of.

The law also requires this year’s fourth graders to be held back if they don’t score as proficient, or show “adequate growth,” on their TCAPs.

Officials are projecting that the fourth grade retention number will be significantly higher than the third-grade rate, because the law allows for fewer exemptions for those students.

Just weeks ago, the state board approved a complex formula for what constitutes enough improvement for fourth graders — but not before several members questioned whether the law is targeting the right age group.

“I just want to encourage us to keep moving in the direction of working with teachers who would say the earlier, the better. Let’s not wait,” said Larry Jensen, a board member from West Tennessee.

Board Chairman Robert Eby, from Oak Ridge, said the body’s decision Monday to send a message to elected officials falls in line with its duty to develop and maintain a master plan for K-12 public education.

“We don’t pass many resolutions,” Eby said. “I think it shows the importance we’re putting on this issue.”

Asked about the board’s resolution, a spokeswoman for the governor reiterated the law’s intent, supports, and impacts.

“Beginning in kindergarten, students have access to high-dosage tutoring and summer school programs that reinforce proven phonics-based instruction,” said Elizabeth Lane Johnson, Lee’s press secretary. “Parents and teachers can track their students’ progress through regular reading screening tests, so they can determine the right path forward based on the unique needs of each student.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee’s reading law gets pushback again as thousands of students could repeat fourth grade

2024-02-16T01:58:33+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free daily newsletter to keep up with statewide education policy and Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Tennessee’s comprehensive pandemic-era literacy law, which last year provided several interventions to help struggling third grade readers advance to the fourth grade, offers no such escape hatches for those same students to avoid retention this year if they don’t show “adequate growth” under the 2021 law.

Now, as the State Board of Education prepares to vote Friday on what constitutes enough improvement for fourth graders who are at risk, state lawmakers are getting pushback from families whose students could be held back if they score poorly on state tests this spring, even after taking advantage of state-funded tutoring and summer learning programs.

At least 5,000 students are projected to fall in that category, according to the state education department. But some estimates put that number higher.

“I think we’re going to put so much pressure on these kids that it’s going to be a real mess,” said Sen. Rusty Crowe during a legislative hearing Wednesday.

The Johnson City Republican wants to revise the 2021 law so that students and parents who are engaged with their teachers in the learning process don’t get punished. He and Rep. Chris Hurt, a Halls Republican, have introduced legislation to let a struggling fourth grade reader’s teacher, principal, and parents decide collaboratively whether to retain the student based on multiple measures, not just state test results for English language arts under the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program.

It’s uncertain whether the General Assembly is willing to revise the law again, especially after making several tweaks last year to widen the criteria for holding back third graders.

Senate Education Committee Chairman Jon Lundberg repeatedly has said Gov. Bill Lee’s literacy law sets reasonable and appropriate expectations in the state’s long drive to improve reading proficiency.

“We’ve moved the needle from 30% to 40% proficiency [for third graders], but 40% still isn’t acceptable,” the Bristol Republican said at a January legislative hearing.

State board is required to define ‘adequate growth’

The State Board of Education appears poised to approve proposed policy changes that include a definition of “adequate growth” for fourth graders to get promoted if they don’t score as proficient readers this spring.

Chairman Robert Eby told lawmakers this week that he expects a full discussion Friday — but that members ultimately will follow the law, which directs the board to define adequate growth.

The proposed definition is tailored to each student, based on testing measurements that the state already uses to predict the probability that a student can become proficient by the eighth grade, when they take their last TCAP tests.

“It is complicated; it is not something that is easy to explain,” said Sara Morrison, executive director of the state board, during testimony before the Senate Education Committee.

“We do feel like it is statistically robust and makes sense,” she added. “But that doesn’t make it easy, and it doesn’t make it an easy decision for our board.”

Board members have received a lot of public feedback about the matter, including a letter this week from Erin O’Hara Block, a Nashville school board member who worked as Tennessee’s assistant commissioner for data and research in former Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration.

Block called the proposed calculations for measuring adequate growth “confusing,” and suggested that the real problem lies with the law itself.

“Instead of passing this revision of policy, I suggest that your board defer until a later date with a request that the legislature remove this portion of the law based on a lack of clear, transparent, viable, and implementable options,” she wrote.

In an interview Thursday with Chalkbeat, Block said state test scores are being misused because of the law. TCAP results were intended for diagnostic purposes, she said, not for high-stakes decisions such as holding a child back a year at school.

“This law was written quickly in the midst of a global pandemic and passed in a special legislative session. So why aren’t we revisiting it?” she asked.

Legislature drew a line in the sand

The law passed in 2021 during a weeklong session called by the governor to address pandemic-related learning disruptions. The same law created summer learning recovery camps that began that year and tutoring programs that started in 2022.

The interventions have proven popular to help students catch up, but the law’s retention provision — which began with last year’s class of third-graders — has been controversial.

Still, due to the intervention options and an appeals process that many families took advantage of, only about 900 third graders, or 1.2% from that class who took the test, were retained because of their reading scores.

The number of fourth graders expected to be retained this year will be significantly higher, officials say, based on the current law.

Research is mixed about whether holding students back helps or hurts them. Supporters say it spurs additional supports that struggling readers desperately need. Critics worry that retention falls disproportionately on student groups who are already marginalized, such as those who are of color or are economically disadvantaged.

During a workshop on Thursday, several State Board members questioned whether the law is even targeting the right age group — and Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds agreed. Intervention and retention policies aimed at kindergarten and first and second grades would be more effective, she said, adding that “third grade is too late.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Many schools want to keep tutoring going when COVID money is gone. How will they pay for it?

2024-02-01T19:21:58+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

As Kelli Bottger works on tutoring programs across Louisiana, she’s been taking state lawmakers on tours, hoping they’ll see what she sees: Tutoring works.

On a visit to an elementary school in East Baton Rouge Parish this past fall, lawmakers took note of how close students had gotten to their tutors. Those relationships had even motivated kids who’d missed a lot of school to attend more regularly.

“It’s one thing for us to explain tutoring, it’s another thing to see it in practice,” said Bottger, who directs the Louisiana Kids Matter Campaign. The organization is piloting reading and math tutoring as part of a $2 million initiative funded by the state and the national nonprofit Accelerate. “They liked the one-on-one attention they were getting with their tutor. They liked being heard and listened to.”

Federal pandemic aid paid for a major expansion of tutoring across the U.S. As the money runs out, education officials and advocates are pushing for state legislators and schools to find a way to keep these programs going. There’s widespread agreement that lots of kids still need academic help, and schools need to provide it.

But the big question is: Where will the money come from?

State lawmakers have lots of funding requests on their plates right now, and not just from schools. Even if some states do come through with extra funds, it will likely be less than what schools had to work with before. That’s left school leaders scrambling to find alternative funding sources and poring over their budgets to figure out what can go so tutoring can stay.

“There is a lot of conversation about what strategic investments districts need to be making, and what should be prioritized,” said Nakia Towns, the chief operating officer for Accelerate, which funds and researches tutoring efforts. “High-dosage tutoring has such an incredible payoff for kids,” she said, that it should be “right at the top of that list.”

Why some states may keep spending on tutoring

Forty states have spent money on tutoring since the pandemic began, according to a recent review conducted by the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University program that researches tutoring.

That’s added up to a huge investment. Last year, the nonprofit Council of Chief State School Officers, which represents state education department heads, estimated that states would spend $700 million of their federal COVID relief dollars to expand tutoring efforts. And local school districts are expected to spend more than $3 billion of their own COVID aid on tutoring, according to an estimate from the Georgetown University think tank FutureEd, based on data compiled by the company Burbio.

Many states also worked to ensure the quality of those tutoring programs. The Stanford review found that 26 states set ground rules so that schools would follow tutoring best practices, such as keeping groups small and holding sessions several times per week. Some say after states did all that legwork, it makes sense not to walk away now.

Already, some states have pledged continued funding — and federal officials have indicated they’d look favorably on state requests for more time to spend pandemic aid if it’s going toward tutoring.

Virginia put an extra $418 million in its state budget for academic recovery this past fall, and plans to spend 70% of that on high-dosage tutoring for students who failed or received low marks on state tests. Michigan set aside $150 million in state funds last year for intensive tutoring under the state’s MI Kids Back on Track program.

Others are working on it. Some Texas districts have asked the state to continue funding tutoring.

In Louisiana, Bottger and State Superintendent Cade Brumley are hopeful the legislature will sign off on putting money for in-school tutoring into the state’s main funding stream for schools. How much money that could be is still under discussion. But it would be in addition to the $5 million request the education department made to add math to the state’s $40 million literacy tutoring voucher program.

As Brumley meets with state officials to talk about more money for tutoring, his message has been: “Please give it serious consideration.”

“Students need to be able to read and do math by the time they exit our elementary schools,” he said.

In New Jersey, Paula White, the executive director of the advocacy group JerseyCAN, is asking the state to keep paying for tutoring, too.

As White tries to win lawmakers’ continued support, her plan is to emphasize the positive results that tutoring has produced and the state’s stagnant test scores — “Are we over the hump? Is the problem solved? And we know the answer to that is ‘no,’” she said.

It helps, she said, that state leaders have already talked publicly about the importance of tutoring, as New Jersey is running a $52 million high-impact tutoring grant program with federal funds. Still, she knows it will be an “uphill battle” with other federal aid drying up, and the state taking in less revenue.

“We just have to be vigilant about making sure that it gets the budgetary attention that it deserves,” White said.

How school districts are trying to fund tutoring themselves

Absent new state funds, many districts will likely be looking for programs to trim or eliminate so they can keep tutoring. That’s what Superintendent Scott Muri and his team are doing now in Ector County, Texas.

During the pandemic, the district launched a virtual tutoring program that’s become a must-keep. Ector County schools budgeted around $5 million a year in COVID funds for the program, which amounts to 1% of the district’s discretionary spending. Now staff are hoping to make up part of the difference by cutting math and reading apps that aren’t working well, or aren’t used much. In the past, teachers or schools could pick their preferred programs, but that resulted in a lot of duplication.

“Choice and options are still important, but we want the most effective options,” Muri said. “Let’s get rid of the good and only keep the great.”

Districts also will be looking for ways they could spend existing federal or state funding meant to help students from low-income families, students with disabilities, or English learners on tutoring programs. States could help by providing school districts with more guidance on how they can combine those pots of money, said Allison Socol, a vice president at The Education Trust, which recently published a guide for making equitable budget decisions as COVID aid runs out.

“One of the things we’ve heard directly from district leaders and school leaders is struggles with rethinking how those dollars are spent,” Socol said. “Status quo is hard to change.”

Some may consider shrinking the size of their tutoring program to focus on kids who most need help, or cutting an after-school tutoring program to focus on tutoring during the school day. That’s considered a better way to reach students, as many kids don’t have transportation or can’t stay after school.

However, tutoring experts are cautioning against making group sizes larger or reducing how often tutoring happens as a way to cut costs.

“Once a week in a small group of 10″ isn’t likely to produce “the outsized positive effects that we expect from high-impact tutoring,” said Nancy Waymack, who directs research partnerships and policy for the National Student Support Accelerator. “We really want to make sure that those groups are kept to a small number, so that students can get individual attention.”

There could be other avenues, too. Some school districts and tutoring programs have used federal work study grants to pay college students to tutor, according to a January report from FutureEd. Federal officials are urging schools to tap that funding source, though it can be a little complicated.

Amy Cohen, an assistant vice provost at the George Washington University, helps recruit and train college students to tutor middle schoolers in DC Public Schools. They’re paid using federal work-study funds through a program called Math Matters.

The college students take a one-credit course to learn about the curriculum they’ll use and how to work with kids, and then Math Matters matches them with schools that want tutors. So far, it’s been a popular work-study job, and the program has placed 84 tutors in schools.

With 30 years of experience working on work-study programs, Cohen says there are a few things to keep in mind.

It’s relatively easy for a college to launch a new work-study job like this, but it can be harder for a school district to know where to start. A staff person who can handle recruitment and oversight is key, Cohen said — but that’s an added cost.

And tutoring sessions backed by work-study dollars have to be planned carefully so college students don’t hit their earning limit too quickly, which would create inconsistency for kids.

“Federal work study is a hugely important and sometimes overlooked asset,” Cohen said. “I really hope that more investment is made in both thinking about how to do it well and in offering supports.”

Parents see benefit of funding tutoring long term

In the meantime, parents like Kezne’ Cook and D’Mekeus Cook of Lafayette, Louisiana would like to see states continue to fund tutoring programs like the one that’s helped their fourth grader over the last two years.

The Cook family got regular updates about their son's progress in reading from the tutoring center he attended after school with the help of a $40 million Louisiana tutoring program.

Their son, who’s also named D’Mekeus, spent part of kindergarten and all of first grade learning remotely during the pandemic. When he entered second grade, his mom could tell he was struggling to understand what they were reading in class, and he no longer wanted to read aloud at school.

The family took D’Mekeus to a tutoring center after school to get extra help, but that started to get pricey. So they were relieved when they found out about the state’s tutoring voucher program, which provides families with $1,000 per eligible child to pay for private tutoring.

As D’Mekeus got more one-on-one help, his dad noticed his son’s confidence returned, and he started doing better in other subjects at school, too. It’s important for programs like this to stick around, the Cooks said, because it takes time for kids to make progress.

“It’s not something that just occurs overnight,” said Kezne’ Cook. “I see the steps it takes to get to where he’s at now.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

White House calls for focus on tutoring, summer school, absenteeism as pandemic aid winds down

2024-01-18T00:26:36+00:00

Top White House officials are urging schools to double down on tutoring, extra learning time, and efforts to boost attendance as the spending deadline for pandemic aid nears.

To help, federal officials say states can now seek permission for schools to spend the last and largest pot of COVID relief money on these kinds of efforts over the next two school years. Previously, schools had to spend down their money by January 2025.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona announced what the Biden administration is calling its Improving Student Achievement Agenda at a White House event Wednesday with governors and state education commissioners. The new push comes at a time when many states have yet to see math and reading scores rebound to pre-pandemic levels and many students are struggling to fill in gaps in their learning.

Federal officials said they had chosen to focus on these strategies because they are proven ways to raise student achievement.

“These three strategies have one central goal: Giving students more time and more support to succeed,” Cardona said. “We must get back to pre-pandemic levels quickly. But also let’s be clear: The bare minimum that we aspire to is to get back to what it was in 2019. 2019 data wasn’t anything to write home about.”

Though the federal government doesn’t have many tools at its disposal to encourage schools to adopt certain attendance or academic strategies, Cardona said the education department would do what it could.

That includes monitoring states to make sure they are spending federal money on evidence-based approaches to improve school performance, a job they have under federal education law. For example, federal officials could look at how states are running their tutoring programs and step in to provide guidance if the model they’re using isn’t as effective as others.

Education officials also plan to prioritize these strategies for competitive grant funding.

Why the White House wants schools to focus on tutoring and chronic absenteeism

As they did throughout the pandemic, federal officials pointed to high-dosage tutoring as a worthy investment for schools. To do that, programs should tutor students one-on-one or in groups of no more than four, for 30 minutes at least three times a week. Sessions should be scheduled during the school day and take place with a trained tutor, White House officials wrote.

Last year, some states and school districts said they had abandoned efforts to tutor kids after school, finding students often missed sessions because they lacked transportation or had schedule conflicts.

The Biden administration lifted up examples of states and districts that have invested heavily in tutoring, including Maryland, which launched a tutoring corps to focus on middle and high school math this past fall, and Washington, D.C, which is tutoring students in math and English language arts.

During the White House event, Christina Grant, D.C.’s state superintendent of education, said a key part of that investment is staffing tutoring managers in the district’s highest-need schools — a finding that’s been echoed by other tutoring programs. Those managers work like an assistant principal who can set up schedules, examine student data, and group students by ability.

“They are the ones saying, ‘No, no, you can’t go to lunch, you have to come sit here,’” Grant said. “We’re making sure that we didn’t just tell teachers and principals: ‘Hey, do this extra thing.”

Absenteeism soared during the pandemic and remains well above 2018-19 levels in most communities. When children miss school, they fall behind academically and are at greater risk of dropping out. When many students in a school frequently miss class, teachers have to decide whether to repeat material for those who missed, boring their classmates, or leave some students behind.

“We simply cannot accept chronic absenteeism as the new normal,” White House Domestic Policy Advisor Neera Tanden said. “Fortunately, we know what works: engaging parents and families as partners in their children’s education.”

She cited the example of Gompers Elementary-Middle School in northwest Detroit. Chalkbeat chronicled the school’s efforts to keep students in school, including pairing students who were starting to miss too many days with adult mentors and working closely with families.

Family and work obligations, mental health challenges, lack of transportation, and many other factors contribute to children missing too much school.

Federal officials urged schools to make specific commitments to reduce absenteeism, such as increasing calls and texts to parents, doing more home visits, and developing early warning systems. Schools should make sure communication is available in multiple languages.

States also should adopt consistent definitions of chronic absenteeism and incorporate it as a measure in their school accountability system if they haven’t done so already, officials said.

Connecticut Education Commissioner Charlene Tucker-Russell described how the state used data to identify students struggling the most — homeless students, English learners, students with disabilities — and target support. The program trained teachers and community members to do outreach and connect families with shelter, transportation, and mental health resources. An evaluation of the program found a 16% increase in attendance after home visits, Tucker-Russell said.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Luhan Grisholm said she was “embarrassed” about her state’s sky-high rates of chronic absenteeism, including among elementary students. Working with parents is part of the solution, but schools also have to make sure students feel supported and successful so they want to be in school, she said.

“If you aren’t reading at grade level, and you can’t do math at grade level, [school] is not a place you want to be,” she said.

Federal and state officials also emphasized the importance of giving students “more time on task” — both by making sure they are attending school regularly and adding learning time.

That could mean adding time to the school day or year — a strategy many districts have struggled to pull off — or running substantial summer school programs that offer multiple hours of academic instruction per day.

Nearly half of school districts used the largest bucket of COVID relief funds to expand summer school, federal officials said, though already some have made cuts or made plans to do so.

Alabama’s state superintendent, Eric Mackey, said education officials in his state are working with lawmakers and the governor’s office to keep funding summer math and reading camps that have run for the last three years with pandemic aid. The state has provided meals, transportation, and connections to afternoon youth programming to help make it work.

“We’ve built enough momentum that our legislature said: ‘We know we can’t drop this,’” Mackey said. “We have to find a way to continue to fund it and sustain it going forward.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Newark Public Schools still awaiting decision on $52 million N.J. tutoring grant

2023-11-28T19:06:01+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

Since 2020, schools across New Jersey have turned to tutoring as a way to help students who fell behind during the pandemic.

This year, several Newark public and charter schools have expanded tutoring initiatives, using both district teachers and outside organizations. But state money needed to help fund those programs has been slow to come, with some districts, including Newark, still waiting to hear if they will receive grant funding.

In February 2023, the N.J. Department of Education announced a $52 million grant available to all N.J. districts and charter schools serving grades three and four, age groups that most recently showed serious deficits in state test scores. The goal of the grant was to offer support specifically to students disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.

According to Nancy Deering, Newark Public Schools acting director of communications, the district is still waiting to find out whether it has received any grant funding at all.

Laura Fredrick, N.J. Department of Education director of communications, said a first round of recipients, including 243 of the 340 total applicants, was informed of approved funding on Nov. 3.

About $11 million in grant money still remains and a second round of decisions will take place, though the state Department of Education has not announced a specific timeline for that process.

Katherine Bassett, CEO of N.J. Tutoring Corps, a nonprofit working with students from pre-K through eighth grade statewide, said academic challenges that existed long before the pandemic were seriously amplified by COVID.

“I don’t like to say learning losses – I’m a librarian, words are important to me. ‘Learning loss’ makes it sound like scholars learned nothing during the pandemic, and that’s just not true,” said Bassett. “They learned resilience, collaboration, and self-reflection, among other things. They just didn’t learn a lot academically.”

Now, said Bassett, it’s time for students to use their new skills as they move forward in their academic careers. But it won’t be possible without programs such as high-impact tutoring, the preferred method of N.J. Tutoring Corps.

At the start of the 2022-23 school year, 19% of N.J. Tutoring Corps students in third grade were performing at or above grade level in math. By the end of the year, that number had more than doubled to 42%.

To qualify as high-impact tutoring, Bassett said programs must possess several factors including a low student-to-tutor or teacher ratio and a high frequency of sessions.

But for this type of tutoring to take place, sizable funding is also required. For many N.J. school districts and charter schools, this means state money is needed.

School districts and charter schools were permitted to apply for up to $768,000 each in high-impact tutoring grant funding to put toward programs running from Oct. 11, 2023 through Aug. 31, 2024.

However, there have been delays even for districts and charter schools that have already been granted funding. That initial October start date passed with these districts still waiting for usable money.

Grant recipients were required to amend their applications reflecting the amount of money the state has agreed to award them rather than the amount they originally requested, holding up the allocation of funds.

For districts or schools choosing to employ organizations or tutors beyond their teacher force, that amendment process includes communication with chosen tutoring vendors.

Vendors are pre-selected education service providers that grant recipients can choose to pay with awarded funding.

In July 2023, a list of approved vendors was made available to districts and schools wishing to apply for funding. Bassett said the N.J. Tutoring Corps submitted materials at the time of the February announcement in order to be considered for the approved vendors list.

Alternatively, districts may use the funds to pay for existing programs, though approval by the state is required. If NPS is awarded funding, Deering said, it does not plan to hire vendors but rather to pay district teachers to tutor.

Jessica Shearer, managing director of communications for KIPP N.J. charter schools, said KIPP was notified that it will receive $384,000 but had not received usable funds as of Nov. 20. KIPP plans to use grant money to hire tutoring vendors.

Bassett said some N.J. Tutoring programs could begin next month, though she predicts that many other programs statewide won’t begin until the new year.

“This is an important process,” Bassett said. “Tutoring is important work, and even though this takes time, we need to make sure we are doing everything in our power to help young children succeed and grow the skills they are missing.”

Samantha Lauten is a fall reporting intern for Chalkbeat Newark covering public education in the city. Get in touch with Samantha at slauten@chalkbeat.org or reach the bureau newsroom at newark.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Denver Public Schools pledged to pay tutoring vendors based on their results. Did it work?

2023-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to keep up with education news in Denver and around the state.

Two outside companies that Denver Public Schools hired to tutor students in an effort to make up for lost learning fell short of some targets that could have earned the companies extra pay.

Though one company fared better than the other, many students didn’t hit the academic benchmarks spelled out in the district’s contracts. Some students struggled with participation, and staffing was a challenge for the company that tutored students in person.

“It was definitely a learning experience,” said Angelin Thompson, the director of expanded academic learning for DPS. “It’s great if you can do it with fidelity and if you have qualified tutors. There are just a lot of components that go into it that make it effective or ineffective.”

But because the contracts with the companies linked part of their payments to the achievement of certain targets, DPS isn’t paying for outcomes that weren’t achieved.

The concept of outcomes-based contracting is catching on at a time when school districts across the country have more cash to spend and bigger gaps to close.

Pandemic-era disruptions caused many students to miss key lessons, which prompted the federal government to invest billions of dollars of COVID-19 relief funding in America’s schools.

Tutoring quickly emerged as a leading research-based strategy to catch students up — especially high-impact or high-dosage tutoring, which DPS defined as 36 hours per student.

Colorado lawmakers set aside nearly $5 million in state funding in 2021 for grants to school districts to set up high-impact tutoring programs, and the State Board of Education pumped even more federal COVID relief aid, known as ESSER, into the program.

Denver Public Schools, the state’s largest district, applied for the grants and won. The tutoring began in fall 2021 and ramped up last school year when DPS signed contracts with two companies: Cignition and University Instructors. But the program was still pilot-size, serving only about 1,500 students total, or about 2% of all students in DPS.

Younger students made less progress

University Instructors struggled the most to meet the benchmarks in its contract.

In the 2022-23 school year, the Virginia-based company provided in-person literacy tutoring to DPS students in kindergarten through third grade. Its contract was for a maximum of $1.2 million: $900 per student in base pay with the possibility of $1,500 per student in payments based on hitting target outcomes.

The outcomes were based on the mechanics of reading: Did students’ fluency improve, as measured by a test called iStation? How about their vocabulary or phonemic awareness?

The answer for many students was no — or at least not enough to meet the benchmarks in the contract. For example, about half of the 641 students tutored by University Instructors met the benchmark in fluency, but only 17% met the benchmark in vocabulary, Thompson said.

University Instructors will likely be paid about $826,000, or about 68% of the maximum in its contract, according to calculations by Thompson’s staff.

The company did not respond to messages seeking comment for this story.

Staffing challenges contributed to the results, Thompson said. University Instructors struggled at times to hire qualified local tutors and provide substitutes when tutors were out, she said.

Another hiccup was more technical. Not all DPS schools use the iStation test that University Instructors’ target outcomes were based on. Thompson’s staff tried to approximate whether students who took other tests met the benchmarks, but she said that wasn’t always possible.

Online tutoring was more successful

Cignition fared better. District records show DPS paid the California-based company $1.25 million to provide online math tutoring to students in third through eighth grade in 2022-23. Cignition’s contract with DPS was for up to $1.3 million, and the company served 924 students.

Cignition had four outcomes it was trying to achieve: two based on students’ confidence about math, as measured by surveys before and after tutoring, and two based on students’ academic growth, as measured by test scores before and after tutoring. The company was paid a base rate of $720 per student and could earn $940 per student on top of that if it met all targets.

In an interview, Cignition provided a detailed breakdown of its results. The majority of students reported higher confidence, with as many as 89% meeting one of the survey-based benchmarks. Fewer students — 72% — met the academic benchmarks, the company said.

Michael Cohen, founder and CEO of Cignition, said he’s proud of the outcomes.

“We care about quality,” he said. “We’re there to help their students that are struggling the most. Some of those students are really, really struggling, and we do everything we can for every student to bring them up as far as they can possibly get in that school year. There’s going to be a range. Not every last one will get to the highest possible grade.”

Unlike University Instructors, Cignition did not struggle with staffing, according to both the company and DPS. Its model calls for one tutor, who can live anywhere in the country, to work online with a group of four students, giving that group undivided attention.

But Cignition did report issues with student attendance and schools occasionally canceling virtual tutoring sessions. While DPS was aiming to provide students with at least 36 hours of tutoring, Cignition said 50 hours is the gold standard. Only about 10% of DPS students logged 50 hours, the company said. About half of the students logged 25 hours.

Outcomes-based contracts catching on

At a time when other school districts across the country have had trouble with external tutoring companies, the state grant allowed DPS to try high-impact tutoring relatively risk-free — an opportunity that Thompson said will inform the district’s tutoring strategy going forward.

“Because of the grant, we were able to try these things and learn what works and what doesn’t,” she said. “Now as we plan for what tutoring will look like with Denver Public Schools’ money, we can think about all the things we learned and do it differently.”

One aspect DPS will likely keep, Thompson said, is outcomes-based contracting. While the concept has been around for years in industries such as health care and construction, it’s new in K-12 education, with about 13 school districts actively participating, said Brittany Miller, the director of outcomes-based contracting for the Georgia-based Southern Education Foundation.

Before Miller worked for the foundation, she worked for DPS and helped set up the outcomes-based tutoring contracts. The benefit, she said, is that school districts have a tangible way to judge whether the results are worth the millions of dollars they spend on external vendors.

“There is a lack of infrastructure in K-12 education, particularly in the procurement process, to say, ‘After we spent these funds, what happened for kids?’” Miller said. “This shores up a lot of that.”

Miller said outcomes-based contracting benefits vendors, too, because it sets clear expectations rather than the fuzzy goals that companies sometimes complain about. It also gives the companies the opportunity to earn more money for good performance.

Toni Rader, vice president of learning quality and operations for Cignition, said the company has been doing outcomes-based contracts with districts since 2021.

“We love to do outcomes-based contracts,” Rader said. “It’s helpful for all parties involved, because it makes it clear what we’re shooting for.”

As for DPS, its state grant goes through this school year. But Thompson said the dollar amount is much lower this year, and there are new restrictions. DPS will have just $400,000 to spend, and only on middle school math tutoring, for which the district will request proposals soon.

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Indianapolis Public Schools expands virtual tutoring during the school day after some success

2023-09-18T11:00:00+00:00

Indianapolis Public Schools is expanding its virtual tutoring efforts to reach more students during the school day after some of the district’s most underperforming schools saw positive growth on the state ILEARN exam from the program.

The virtual tutoring offered by Tutored by Teachers expanded this school year from 11 of the district’s chronically underperforming elementary “Emerging Schools” to 22 out of roughly 40 traditional IPS schools.

Principals were able to opt into the program, using it to fulfill one of several needs: support for vacant classroom teaching positions in math, English, science, or social studies, SAT prep for high school students, and intervention for students at a certain achievement level, according to Tutored by Teachers.

The expansion means the district is leaning even more heavily into one of its largest efforts to recover from pandemic learning loss, with help from federal coronavirus relief funds. Roughly 2,755 students will now get tutoring during the school day, according to Tutored by Teachers, up from last year’s figure of over 1,200.

IPS is also relaunching Tutoring for All, an after-school virtual tutoring program also offered through Tutored by Teachers, which has garnered just over 2,000 students so far.

School districts around the country have turned to high-dosage tutoring to help students recover from pandemic-era learning loss, although the efforts in the country’s largest districts have only reached a small fraction of students. IPS has embraced the tutoring offered through Tutored by Teachers, which offers small-group instruction during the day by certified educators from all over the country.

This year, the tutoring offered during the day at participating schools in IPS can vary by school site, said Tutored by Teachers co-founder Rahul Kalita.

“It requires some strategic thinking and effort for the entire leadership team of a school to think through, ‘Who do we want to target?’” Kalita said.

The expansion also means some students may be getting double doses of tutoring — one session at school and another at home.

Robin Hill, who signed her fourth grade daughter up for after-school tutoring, was surprised when she learned last week that her daughter will also get tutoring during the school day at George Washington Carver Montessori School 87.

Math is her daughter’s strong suit, Hill said, but she struggles with English and struggled with reading when the pandemic hit in her earlier elementary years.

“I love it,” she said of the news of tutoring expansion. “Absolutely love it. Because she needs it.”

IPS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Data from Tutored by Teachers shows positive results

Data analysis from Tutored by Teachers indicates both during and after-school tutoring showed some promising academic results.

Emerging School students who participated in more than 20 hours of tutoring on average grew more on the ILEARN assessment in math and English than students who did not, according to the company’s analysis. Those students grew by about 14 more points on ILEARN in math and 12 in English.

And students who participated in more than 10 hours of after-school tutoring in the Tutoring for All program also grew more in math and English than their non-tutored counterparts from fall to spring, according to another analysis of seven of the 11 Emerging Schools.

Funding for Tutored by Teachers has been one of the district’s largest expenditures from its federal pandemic relief coffers.

The district spent roughly $4.3 million out of its roughly $217 million in federal relief dollars on Tutored by Teachers from the start of last school year through March 31, according to records of the district’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund spending.

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Lawrence Township schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools hired hundreds of tutors with federal COVID money. Can they keep them?

2023-09-18T10:30:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and statewide education policy.

A. Philip Randolph Elementary School parent Victoria Wicks has hair as vibrant as her personality. Last week it was colored a bright teal, but she changes it up frequently — sometimes picking a color requested by the students she tutors.

The mother of eight, with children ranging in age from 10 months to 16 and including twins, is deeply involved at Randolph in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood on the South Side. Six of Wicks’ children currently attend the school and she’s on two parent councils.

On a recent Friday, Wicks sat across the table from a student and gave instructions in a practiced, serious tone. This exercise would assess what level of tutoring the girl would be placed into for the rest of the school year.

Once the reading of passages and sight words was over, Wicks let her nature shine to the fullest, telling a student, “Good job! That’s what I’m talking about!”

Wicks became a tutor during summer 2021, when a fellow parent invited her to join Randolph’s contingent of the Chicago Public Schools Tutor Corps. The district had earmarked $25 million in federal pandemic relief money to hire and train 850 tutors to help kids catch up on much-needed early reading and middle- to high-school math skills.

Wicks took on the job of reading tutor with her trademark enthusiasm, rehearsing how to teach the lessons and give assessments, using the curriculum provided. She found success helping her tutoring groups read better.

But across the district, the corps got off to a slow start. Only 450 tutors were hired by halfway through the 2021-22 school year. Onboarding was slow and it took a few months to get the curriculum providers — Amplify for reading, Saga Education for math — under contract and training tutors.

Since then, the number of tutors has grown. On the first day of school, CPS had more than 600 tutors, about three-quarters of the initial hiring goal of 850. Currently, tutors are working in 229 schools, but the district declined a request to provide a list of the schools and their locations.

A summer hiring push helped schools, including Randolph, staff up, some principals said. But this school year marks the final year the district will have federal COVID relief funds to spend on tutors before the dollars run dry next fall.

Chicago’s tutoring is high-quality but small scale

According to district officials, Tutor Corps has reached 10,000 students with at least one tutoring session since its 2021 launch. Like many districts nationwide, Chicago’s program aimed to provide students “high-dosage” tutoring, which means students meet in a group of no more than four with the same tutor over an extended period of time, like a semester or a full school year. The intensive sessions are 30 minutes during the school day, at least three times a week.

The tutors must be trained to use a structured curriculum that can meet students where they are and offer lots of chances to practice the skills they are learning. Research shows this kind of tutoring benefits struggling students the most.

Meeting these exacting requirements can be tough. Other districts have struggled to make it work, but Chicago has stayed true to it from the beginning.

At Randolph, tutors meet with no more than three students up to five times a week. Principal Keviyona Smith-Ray also makes sure tutors have time to meet with the teachers of the students they are tutoring.

“CPS is doing something we’re not really seeing across the United States,” said Maryellen Leneghan, vice president of district partnerships for Saga Education, which provides training and curriculum for the math tutors.

She said Chicago’s uniqueness is threefold: The district has chosen to keep tutoring fully in person, maintain control of tutor hiring, and balance strict adherence to the model with flexibility for schools.

“The number of students it has been able to help has been impressive,” said Becky Betts, chief marketing and external affairs officer for A Better Chicago, which has financially supported tutor hiring.

But 10,000 students is barely a drop in the bucket for a district of more than 300,000 students, said Natasha Dunn, a CPS parent and Black Community Collaborative co-founder.

Though data on the tutor corps’ effects has yet to be made public, a study from the University of Chicago’s Education Lab is expected later this school year.

While kids learn, schools develop teacher talent

Like many tutors, Wicks had the same students all year last year and got to know them well, even attending a parent-teacher conference for one of them to show how much the child had progressed over the year.

As a parent herself, she has seen some of her own children grow as readers through tutoring, and she uses what she’s learning as a tutor to help them at home.

“Being with Tutor Corps helps them understand how to break down the words,” she said. ”When it’s time for them to go into that classroom and read, they’ll use the strategies we have taught them.”

Smith-Ray said the tutors are also building relationships with students beyond their academic sessions and helping them open up about tough issues in their lives.

She’s also seen an unexpected perk: Two of last year’s tutors have joined the permanent staff — one as a special education classroom assistant and the other as an office assistant.

“It’s an amazing opportunity to hire within the community,” said Smith-Ray. “The students want to be with them. They’re familiar with them.”

The six tutors who are part of CPS Tutor Corps at Haugan Elementary in Chicago’s Albany Park. The school’s co-principal, Heather Yutzy, said the program has become a helpful hiring pipeline for the school.

Across town, at Haugan Elementary in Chicago’s Albany Park, co-principal Heather Yutzy said Tutor Corps is becoming a “stepping stone” into teaching or other permanent jobs. At Haugan, one of last year’s tutors has moved into student teaching. That tutor’s younger sister, a recent graduate of Northeastern Illinois University, is now tutoring and planning a career change to go into teaching.

Northeastern is among a group of local colleges, led by Roosevelt University, that is creating a tutor-to-teacher pipeline. A Better Chicago awarded $1.6 million to Roosevelt University to build a tutoring pathway in partnership with other local higher ed institutions. According to A Better Chicago, about 65 Roosevelt students completed a full year of tutoring last year. Of them, seven Roosevelt students are moving into student teaching this year and another 10 students are expected to move into student teaching in fall 2024.

Getting sold on the program and finding the money

Though hard data on Tutor Corps’ effectiveness is not yet publicly available, tutors and principals can see early signs of progress on the ground.

Haugan parent Rita Tello joined the corps in the middle of last year as a math tutor. She has worked hard to help struggling middle schoolers see math as both challenging and fun.

Her groups broke into two-on-two teams to take Kahoot quizzes and play Jeopardy-style math games, often with a small prize for the winners.

Though not every student’s math grade improved, she could see growth based on their “exit slips” — a quick, weekly progress check — and a difference in their attitude toward math.

She said her students were skeptical of her and reluctant to do math at the start. But by the end of the year, she said, they were eager to come to tutoring. They would ask her, “Are you picking us up today? Are you picking us up tomorrow, Ms. Tello?”

At Randolph, Smith-Ray said one of the most obvious signs of improvement in math is that children know their multiplication facts fluently and no longer need a times table reference with them in classroom small groups.

She said the youngest students are the most likely to outgrow the need for tutoring quickly, because many of the entering kindergartners had little preschool experience with pre-reading skills to learn sounds and letters.

Smith-Ray added that tutoring has also helped identify students who need individualized education programs, or IEPs, for special education services and provided “clear data” to help case managers and teachers “make sure students were given what they needed.”

However, for most students, Smith-Ray said continued tutoring will be key, “[They] are meeting their growth targets. They’re just still not at grade level yet.”

Not all students see linear progress. Barbara Formoso Minarik is the grandmother of alumni of James Monroe Elementary in Logan Square and has been part of the Tutor Corps since it started. Over the past three school years, she has seen children bounce in and out of tutoring.

Formoso Minarik wonders if some of her students need more support than tutoring can offer, like a referral for special education services. But that’s not a quick fix. “It’s just a long process,” she said.

It’s also a long process for a school district to embed and sustain a program like Tutor Corps. It can take about five years, said Leneghan, with Saga Education.

“Every year you learn more and more and build your capacity,” she said.

Chicago, like districts nationwide, doesn’t have much more time. The federal deadline to spend COVID recovery money is next September.

In a statement, the district said it “values this program and is exploring ways to continue providing these foundational services even after all federal [COVID]dollars are expended by September 2024.”

Whatever district officials decide, the principals at Randolph and Haugan want tutors like Wicks and Tello to continue their work.

“If I had to use my budget, I would still keep Tutor Corps,” said Smith-Ray. “It may not be six people, maybe it’ll be four, but I would still employ them.”

Yutzy, the Haugan co-principal, is just as determined.

“I’m totally sold on this program,” she said. “I think it has been a 100% valuable experience.”

Maureen Kelleher is a freelance journalist and longtime education writer. For Chalkbeat, she has previously written First Person pieces about choosing a new school for her daughter and helping migrant students enroll in school. Kelleher is now the editorial director at Future Ed, an independent, solution-oriented think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

Hundreds of Las Vegas and Tampa area schools drop Paper’s online tutoring

2023-09-06T16:35:12+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

Hundreds of schools in two of the nation’s largest districts have stopped offering online tutoring through the company Paper following questions about quality and cost.

Hillsborough County schools in Florida dropped Paper altogether, while around 150 schools in Clark County, Nevada decided not to work with Paper this school year, according to district records obtained by Chalkbeat.

“After evaluating usage rates, return on investment, and student achievement data, we decided not to renew the contract,” Tanya Arja, a Hillsborough County schools spokesperson, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat last week.

Paper has lost other major clients recently, including Boston Public Schools, which cut ties with the virtual tutoring company this summer, a year earlier than expected, after a small share of students used the virtual tutoring.

The cutbacks come as many districts are evaluating which academic strategies to keep — and which to toss — as they head into the final full school year to spend billions in federal COVID relief dollars. The decisions indicate that at least some educators have grown disillusioned with Paper and perhaps opt-in virtual tutoring more broadly.

Some districts are instead investing in regularly scheduled virtual or in-person tutoring sessions during the school day, following the high-dosage model backed by research.

Paper’s online tutoring practices under scrutiny

COVID funding helped fuel significant growth for Paper, a company that landed contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to offer virtual tutoring to more than three million students in districts across the U.S. and Canada. Demand for the company’s services soared during the pandemic as many schools looked to get extra help to their students and had new money to spend.

But Paper has come under scrutiny from Chalkbeat and others for often failing to deliver the one-on-one expert help that the company advertises to schools. Some younger kids and struggling students have found the tutoring platform — which looks like a text-based instant messenger with a digital whiteboard — difficult to use. Some districts previously cut ties with Paper after a small share of students logged on for help.

Recently, the company has laid off many of its corporate staffers and tutors, and several top executives are set to depart this month.

In an email, Ava Paydar, a spokesperson for Paper, declined to comment on the changes Hillsborough County and Clark County are making. “We will defer comment to the school districts,” Paydar wrote.

In previous interviews, Paper CEO Philip Cutler defended the quality of Paper’s tutoring, and said the student experience on the Paper platform is always one-on-one because tutors work with students in an individual session — even if tutors are juggling multiple students at once. It’s uncommon for students to be matched with tutors who are unfamiliar with their subject, he added.

Cutler also said that Paper has worked to boost student usage by training teachers and conducting outreach to students and families.

Hillsborough County schools, which serve the area around Tampa, had previously paid Paper around $4 million over the last two years to offer virtual tutoring to 110,000 students in middle and high school. When the district renewed its contract last year, it did so at a reduced price, after raising concerns about low usage. The district had said it would drop Paper if too few students used the tool — and evidently followed through.

Boston school officials cited similar concerns. “For the number of students it was reaching for its cost and our assessment of how it’s been working, Paper has not been worth it,” Max Baker, a spokesperson for the district, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat last month.

Clark County had planned to spend $6.6 million to offer Paper in every school this year, district records show. Schools were told to come up with a plan to get every student in grades 3 to 12 to log on early in the school year.

But the Las Vegas-area district did an about-face shortly after Chalkbeat published an investigation in July that found Paper tutors are often juggling multiple students at the same time and working in subjects they don’t know well — leaving many students frustrated and without needed help. Instead of requiring schools to use Paper, Clark County principals were given the option to keep working with the company or to stop. The schools that opted out serve 102,000 students, or around a third of the district.

Clark County schools appears to have taken public reporting into account while making its decision to cut back on Paper’s services.

The day Chalkbeat published its investigation, a top school official shared the story with Clark County’s superintendent, Jesus Jara, according to emails obtained through an open records request. A few hours later, Jara asked a top academic officer to come see him, then added: “We may need to review this contract and move some funds to FEV Tutors.”

A few weeks later, the school board approved spending $4 million on FEV Tutor, another virtual tutoring company that, like Paper, relies on text-based chat and a digital whiteboard, but has the added feature of live audio for students to speak to their tutors.

In an email, a Clark County schools spokesperson said the district had “reallocated funds previously designated for Paper Tutoring services to include an additional option, FEV Tutor,” but would not say how much the district is now spending on Paper.

Paper also lost a contract with the state of New Mexico earlier this year, after education officials there said the company had failed to get academic help to enough students.

But many other school districts are maintaining their relationship with Paper, which still holds contracts with the states of Mississippi and Tennessee, and several large districts, including Los Angeles Unified and Palm Beach County schools in Florida.

The Washoe County School District in Reno, Nevada agreed to pay Paper up to $2 million to offer virtual tutoring to middle and high school students this school year and last year. The district recently cut back on paying teachers to tutor students after school, justifying the move with the addition of Paper.

“With the introduction of Paper on-line tutoring, in-person tutoring has been reduced,” spokesperson Victoria Campbell said in an email.

In Clark County, Spanish teacher Carmen Andrews will continue to have access to Paper at the Nevada Learning Academy, where she teaches students online.

When Andrews tried the tool last year — a district requirement — she found that some of her high schoolers waited a long time to be paired with a tutor, and some were matched with tutors who didn’t speak Spanish but tried to help anyway.

(Paydar, the Paper spokesperson, said the company always has Spanish tutors available, though acknowledged that mismatches can occur. “While very rare, we find that this type of experience can happen when a tutoring session starts with a focus on one area and then crosses over to Spanish as a subject,” Paydar wrote.)

Andrews sees some value in the kind of virtual support that Paper offers, especially for students whose parents work late in the Las Vegas hospitality industry. This year she’s planning to use Paper to give students extra feedback on written assignments in Spanish. But she’s glad the district gave schools the choice to opt out.

“If a school sees no use for it,” she said, “why pay the money for them to have it?”

Matt Barnum contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Indianapolis expands tutoring program for reading skills after literacy pilot shows promise

2023-08-23T18:41:44+00:00

The city of Indianapolis will launch a literacy tutoring program at nine schools and a Boys & Girls Club location for this school year, after a pilot program with a small group of students showed some promise.

The program, Circle City Readers, is one of a myriad of tutoring programs that both the state and school districts have launched in the wake of the pandemic. Reading scores on the state third grade exam known as IREAD dropped in 2021 and have essentially stagnated since then.

Circle City Readers, funded by $1 million from the city’s coronavirus relief funds, will provide small-group tutoring for up about 800 students at the following locations:

Pleasant Run Elementary School (Warren Township).
Hawthorne Elementary School (Warren Township).
Sankofa School of Success at Arlington Woods School 99 (IPS Innovation Network school).
Global Prep Academy at Riverside School 44 (IPS Innovation Network school).
The PATH School at Stephen Foster School 67 (IPS Innovation Network school).
Liberty Grove at Elder Diggs School 42 (IPS Innovation Network school).
Tindley Genesis Academy (charter school).
Avondale Meadows Academy (charter school).
Vision Academy Riverside (charter school).
Jonathan Jennings School 109 Boys and Girls Club.

The program, launched in partnership with the RISE Indy education advocacy nonprofit, will offer tutoring during the day at school sites from paid parents and community members. RISE Indy is helping to identify and recruit tutors.

The program adopts a curriculum based in the science of reading that emphasizes researched-backed ways of learning, such as phonics.

As evidence of the program’s potential, Mayor Joe Hogsett’s Office of Education and Innovation said that all 36 students in the Circle City Readers pilot performed better on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) reading assessment at the end of the pilot than at the start. The pilot took place over eight weeks earlier this year at Liberty Grove — a charter school within the IPS Innovation Network of autonomous schools — and at the Mary Rigg Neighborhood Center.

The four IPS schools in the program are “restart” or “jumpstart” schools in need of academic improvement. All but one of them — the Path School — posted declines in IREAD scores from 2022 to 2023. IREAD scores also dropped from last year to this year at two out of the three charters in the program, Avondale Meadows Academy and Vision Academy Riverside.

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Marion County schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect how tutors are recruited into the program.

Indiana expands tutoring grants to more students and increases the maximum state funding

2023-08-11T19:35:25+00:00

Indiana is expanding its grant program for tutoring that it launched last fall to cover middle school students, as well as more elementary schoolers, the state education department announced Thursday.

In addition, the maximum grant award for Indiana Learns, which provides grants to students to use for tutoring and academic programs that meet “learning partner” requirements, is increasing to $1,000. The new maximum award of $1,000 is available to students who are new to the program and those who signed up earlier.

The state first rolled out Indiana Learns last fall in response to learning loss in the wake of the pandemic. Originally geared towards students in fourth and fifth grades, the program is now open to any student in third through eighth grade who qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, and whose scores on state math or English language arts tests were below proficiency.

The expansion comes as 2023 state ILEARN scores demonstrated a small improvement in math but a slight dip in English. In 2022, 41.2% of Indiana students scored at or above proficiency in English, compared to 40.7% of students this year. Meanwhile, math proficiency rose from 39.4% in 2022 to 40.9% this year.

“We know from our 2023 ILEARN proficiency results, and the ongoing academic impact/recovery analysis, that our middle school students in particular need strategic learning support and interventions,” Secretary of Education Katie Jenner said in a press release.

Families can find out if their student is eligible for a grant by going to indianalearns.org and entering their student test number, or STN, and birthday. The STN can be obtained from their student’s school or their ILEARN scores if the family has access to that.

If a student is eligible, families can immediately view the funds available to them. On the same website, they can also browse tutoring partners and schedule services.

Prior to this expansion, in addition to the initial state grant of $500, districts could choose to provide an additional $250 per student for Indiana Learns that the state would match. But the state education department said that with the maximum Indiana Learns state award increasing to $1,000, there’s no longer a matching component of the program.

Molly Williams, a spokesperson for the Indiana Department of Education, said that when families use the grants and their remaining funding drops to $200, money will automatically reload if they still have grant funding available.

The state also said that the grants can now support tutoring during the day at schools.

“This will allow parents and families, who may not otherwise be able to pay for high-dosage tutoring, to access these opportunities for their students and provide them the additional support they need,” Jenner said.

Jade Thomas is a summer reporting intern covering education in the Indianapolis area. Contact Jade at jthomas@chalkbeat.org.

Newark’s state test scores dropped last spring. What’s helping students get back on track?

2023-08-03T11:30:08+00:00

In Newark’s North Ward, students in Ms. Murphy’s second grade class at Park Elementary School sat quietly on a colorful rug at the front of the classroom in mid-July, listening to their teacher read a book.

The summer school class was practicing reading comprehension skills by answering questions about the story and summarizing the main ideas.

“Look at the sun, the rain,” said Kathleen Murphy as she showed students the drawings in the book. “Where is our setting?”

Two students quickly raised their hands.

“Outside by a tree!” one student.

“What kind of tree?” Murphy asked the class.

“Oak!” several students shout out, eager to answer.

Murphy’s class is part of Newark Public Schools’ five-week summer school program, one of many efforts across city schools to help students get back on grade level after spring 2022 state test scores showed dismal drops in English language arts and math.

As Newark students get ready to return to class in five weeks, officials are hoping that such initiatives aimed at helping those who have fallen behind will pay off.

Some of those interventions began last spring with high-dosage tutoring during the day at KIPP New Jersey schools. Others – such as Murphy’s class – took place during summer school programs.

About 10,000 public school students were required to attend summer school this year – double the number from last year – with more scattered throughout city charter schools.

In Newark Public Schools, students are required to attend summer school based on attendance, grades, and state test scores. Those who did not attend within the first three days were at risk of losing their seats and high schoolers enrolled in the summer accelerated program needed to attend every day to keep their spots, according to the district.

“The effort to close the achievement gap and accelerate learning is a collective effort,” said Newark Public Schools Assistant Superintendent José Fuentes. “And hopefully we’ll see robust gains from this summer.”

New Jersey students took the state’s standardized test last spring – the first time since 2019 – providing a glimpse into students’ slow recovery after COVID-19 disruptions. The scores pointed to the severity of the pandemic’s toll on student learning and the efforts Newark leaders must take to recover from it.

In spring 2022, only 49% of New Jersey students passed the state’s English language arts test, 27% of Newark public school students, and 47% of the city’s charter school students reached proficiency levels in the same subject.

Newark’s younger students suffered the biggest declines from pre-pandemic levels, with only 19% of Newark Public School third graders and 40% of the city’s charter school third graders reaching proficiency levels on the state’s English language arts test. Third grade is widely viewed as a critical age for reading and a measure of a student’s future academic success. The scores also showed that Newark’s struggles with achieving math proficiency have only grown since the pandemic.

In July, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka declared an “urgent” literacy crisis throughout the city and launched a 10-point Youth Literacy Action plan that calls on local schools, parents, community partners, and programs to get young children reading and writing.

Rising second grade students work on math problems in Kelly Stern’s class on Thursday, July 20, 2023, at Achieve Community Charter School in Newark, New Jersey.

The sobering test scores are part of the crisis that led city educators to develop strategies to refine students’ skills in reading, writing, and math this summer. In the classroom, teachers are working with students who need help practicing handwriting and strengthening reading comprehension skills, while others implement group work that challenges students to discuss different ways to solve math problems.

For public school leaders, home to roughly 38,000 students, federal COVID relief dollars have been the district’s “saving grace” in expanding summer programs to 14 schools this year, said Superintendent Roger León during a press conference in June.

Part of the district’s strategy is ensuring those dollars “last a long time” so they continue to offer tutoring and other recovery support during the school year, León added.

‘Learning happens when students are having fun’

Park Elementary’s summer school principal, Ladylaura Bueno, is responsible for making sure her 127 students required to attend summer classes are there.

The program “moves very quickly,” Bueno said, and missing one week of summer school “is like missing one marking period.”

The goal is for the summer school experience to mirror that of the academic year, Fuentes added. On day one, students are tested in either reading or math and then tested again at the end “to see the efficacy of the program,” Bueno said. Instruction is tailored to each student’s need, making participation a key component of the program.

School leaders like Bueno, normally a vice principal at Salomé Ureña Elementary school, say summer school planning takes months, and ensuring that parents understand the importance of it is part of the work to help students succeed.

“We’re working to engage parents and make sure they understand that their kids aren’t done just because it’s summer,” Fuentes said. “If you miss school, we make calls.”

Developed by Newark Board of Education curriculum experts, the district’s Summer Plus program combines academic and enrichment activities into a full-day summer program for students who will be entering grades one through eight. In the morning, students work on improving math and literacy skills, and in the afternoon, students are free to join extracurricular activities led by partnering organizations in Newark.

“The teacher is the facilitator here and that places the onus on students to solve the problem and find different ways to reach a solution,” Fuentes said.

In one fifth grade class at Park, for example, 12 students who need extra support in math focus on collaborative work and finding ways to solve problems on their own. Then they discuss different solutions with their peers. Students are also pulled from class at different times of the day and placed in smaller groups with teachers who provide more targeted support in reading and math.

During the regular academic year, León said they plan to implement a similar structure and provide tutoring for students throughout the school day – a requirement under Baraka’s 10-Point Action Plan.

Ultimately, “learning happens when students are having fun and are engaging in hands-on activity,” Fuentes said.

Newark charter looks for ways to refine student learning

Overall, Newark’s trends showed that students performed lower in math state tests than in English language arts. That’s one reason Achieve Community Charter School is focusing on improving student performance in math as part of its summer program.

Achieve students entering grades one through seven are tested during the first week of school to assess their needs, said Tina Leake, Achieve’s summer school site director. Based on that data, students are placed in tutoring groups that target specific skills in math and literacy.

Rising fifth grade students work in small groups with an “All Star” tutor in Vanessa Simon’s class on Thursday, July 20, 2023, at Achieve Community Charter School in Newark, New Jersey.

Summer tutoring can include group instruction or one-on-one learning during the school day, in addition to instruction in the classroom in the morning, said summer school principal Patrice Norwood. School leaders and teachers then evaluate their tutoring strategy on a daily basis as students move through the program.

“They’re not going to stay in the same group for the whole program, or the whole week or even daily,” Norwood added. “It might change based on what we’re seeing.”

Keeping Achieve’s 184 summer school students engaged is also part of the work to support student learning, Norwood said.

Through a partnership with After School All Stars, a nonprofit organization working with low-income youth, students are spread throughout 10 classrooms with one instructor and an “All Star” tutor who helps out during the small group hour built into the day. In their classrooms, students rotate among three different groups: instruction with a teacher, iReady lessons in math or reading on their Chromebooks, and group work specific to students’ needs.

Students may also need extra support in skills not usually worked on during the school day such as handwriting or adding and subtracting. Small groups and tutoring are a way to build those skills, Norwood said.

School leaders also keep a close eye on students’ emotional and mental health and work with community partners to support children and their families. Recently, for example, one of Achieve’s students was dealing with the loss of a family member and school leaders offered to provide therapy and support services for the family.

“We’re here to help both students and their families,” Norwood said.

Their approach to supporting students and evaluating and reassessing their program is part of “the love students get,” she added.

KIPP schools maximize impact of tutoring

For KIPP New Jersey Schools, which serves students in Newark and Camden, the work to boost student performance began this spring with two new partnerships that helped provide high-dosage tutoring in math and reading. That goes along with recent research that shows intensive tutoring can be effective in helping students improve in problem areas.

Two of the charter school network’s elementary schools partnered with the New Jersey Tutoring Corps, a statewide nonprofit created to address academic recovery needs post pandemic, to provide in-person tutoring to 100 students. The preliminary data for elementary student outcomes is “promising” and reflects on the efforts of the corps to provide targeted tutoring, said Joe Hejlek, director of wraparound services at KIPP New Jersey.

Overall, the state’s Tutoring Corps served 500 students across New Jersey schools during the 2022-23 pilot. The percentage performing at grade level in math improved from 16% to 40%, and from 23% to 40% in literacy across all grade levels, the Tutoring Corps reported.

But Hejlek says the program’s success in KIPP New Jersey schools is in part linked to student attendance.

“There’s a very direct correlation between the number of sessions students participate in and the amount of growth that they make,” he said.

At the middle school level, three KIPP New Jersey schools partnered with Tutored by Teachers, an organization that provides personalized virtual tutoring for students. Nikeya Stuart is a school leader at TEAM Academy working with students from fifth through eighth grade. At TEAM, 20 students worked with Tutored by Teachers instructors this spring and received virtual tutoring in math twice a week during the school day.

Achieve Community Charter School student’s work on adding and subtracting during the school’s 2023 summer program.

Students were chosen to participate in the program if they were within 10 points of passing the state’s math test and had 95% daily attendance or higher during the academic year, Stuart said. The goal was to choose students who would commit to tutoring “so the program could really yield the results that we were hoping that it would,” Stuart added.

She found sixth and seventh graders were more engaged than students in fifth and eighth grade but noted the importance of finding “a program that works for each student.”

Not all students will benefit from online learning after the pandemic and “if a student did not like learning behind the computer, they may not be the ideal student” for virtual tutoring, Stuart said.

By learning about the impact the tutoring efforts had on students, the charter network is looking to scale up its tutoring program by expanding it to five more schools this year. But it remains unclear whether there will be funding to continue such high-dosage tutoring and other avenues for student academic recovery.

”It’s just a question of making sure we have enough tutors to meet demand,” Hejlek said, “and then making sure we’re being thoughtful about how we select the students and how we set our schools up to maximize the impact of the tutoring.”

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Wondering about tutoring and if your child would benefit? Here are some answers to your questions.

2023-07-20T18:46:52+00:00

Leer en español.

As educators look for ways to help students as they recover academically from pandemic interruptions, tutoring can play a key role.

But across the country, many leaders are seeing that some of the students who need the help the most aren’t taking advantage.

So, as parents, what questions should you be asking about tutoring and whether your student can benefit? Here are answers to some common questions.

When should I consider tutoring for my child?

Rhonda Haniford, associate commissioner of the school quality and support division at the Colorado Department of Education, said the first thing to keep in mind is that different tutoring programs are designed to achieve different goals.

While parents might think tutoring is only to help students who are struggling academically, sometimes programs are designed instead to keep students engaged, accelerate their learning, or hone in on specific skills or needs.

If a parent believes their child is struggling academically, Haniford said they should look at what their school offers.

“First, I would say meet with the school and talk about what they’re seeing,” Haniford said. “Talk about what’s working, what are the child’s strengths as well as where are their needs. And can tutoring help? It depends on what the tutoring program is designed to accomplish.”

Parent Keri Rodrigues said her five sons’ report cards showed good grades and that her boys were doing well. But when she asked them to read to her at home, she noticed two were struggling.

“These were things I could see,” Rodrigues said.

Rodrigues is co-founder of the advocacy group National Parents Union. She advises parents to trust their instincts and ask questions when they believe their children might be struggling. That means starting with more conversations with teachers.

When talking with teachers, Rodrigues said, one of the most important questions to ask is whether your child is reading at grade level, and if not, what is being done to get them there.

“Report cards often are not telling us this information,” she said.

Ashara Baker, a mother to a rising second grader and also a leader with National Parents Union, advises parents that if their child attends a school that has low state test scores, they should consider tutoring even if it seems like their child is doing well.

What questions should I ask to know if this might be a good tutoring program?

Haniford said the first step is to make sure that the goals of the tutoring program match your child’s needs.

After that, she said, parents should ask if their school has a diagnostic assessment of their child. Most schools do, she said. That information can guide tutors to a student’s needs and to build on their strengths.

Rodrigues likes to remind parents that they don’t need to be well-versed in education curriculum to start asking questions. She suggests asking if a program is using evidence-based practices, which are strategies that are based on research and have been proven to work, and if their reading programs are based on the science of reading, the research about how children’s brains learn to read.

“If you hear things like balanced literacy, that might be a problem,” she said. Balanced Literacy is an approach to teaching reading based on a debunked philosophy that reading is natural and requires encouragement. “Even if you just remember they should say ‘science of reading,’ you shouldn’t be intimidated.”

Some research shows that “high-dosage” tutoring programs may be most effective for students who need academic help. Usually that involves in-person instruction a few times a week.

Baker is leading an effort to get New York schools to make high-dosage tutoring available in public schools.

She said good communication is important. Her local district advertised a summer enrichment program, and her daughter attended. Baker knew her daughter was taken to get a library card and to the farmers market, and she heard about how much fun the kids had with water balloons. But Baker said she didn’t know the program was meant to be a form of tutoring.

“It can be fun, but you have to be checking in: How are we doing? Are we making progress?” Baker said.

She also suggests asking if tutors are trained and certified and finding out how many students are working with each tutor. Small groups are best, she said.

Haniford agrees about small groups. She said the most successful programs have no more than six students per tutor.

“They have a clear purpose and vision for what they want to accomplish, and it’s not a catch-all with too many students, because then students are not getting individualized attention,” Haniford said.

How do I know if my child is getting the most from their tutoring?

Baker suggests that parents make sure the tutoring program their school uses, or that they select from outside groups, does some testing that will measure improvement or where more help is needed.

The tutoring program she pays to help her daughter outside of school now gives parents regular reports about how things are progressing and how parents can help maintain the progress at home.

Jennifer Castillo, new principal of Boston P-8 in Aurora, said that the school has tutoring run by an outside group, but uses the school’s own teachers that are already familiar with their students.

“Having those relationships is very important,” Castillo said. “They know where those student’s gaps are, they know the reasons students are there. I think it’s important for the tutors and the student to be able to go to their parents and show that progress. After a month, I’m seeing an increase in scores or ability or confidence, whatever the issue. As a parent, hopefully you don’t have to ask in a strong partnership.”

Castillo said that if the program you’re considering has tutors who aren’t teachers in the school, parents might ask if there’s a way for the tutors and teachers to communicate with each other so that the tutoring help is aligned with what is happening in the classroom.

Should I wait to get my child into a tutoring program?

“There’s always that tug of should I wait a little longer? Maybe it was a rough year. Maybe it was a rough teacher,” Rodrigues said. “Things don’t get easier the more you wait. They get harder.”

This is especially true for younger children who need extra help to learn to read. Being able to read will help students learn more complex subjects later.

Haniford and Castillo believe parents should clarify why their child needs a break — is there a social or emotional issue, for example — and to look at various options to address the issue.

“Kids don’t need a break from learning,” Castillo said. Learning can happen all day, she added. “But we need to ensure they’re engaged and it’s not just sitting and listening. Taking the tutoring outside, making it more hands-on, or making it more applicable might help.”

Castillo also recommends that students understand the importance of tutoring and the benefits they should see themselves.

“The students have to want to be involved,” Castillo said. “Letting them have some ownership will help as well.”

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

This online tutoring company says it offers expert one-on-one help. Students often get neither.

2023-07-17T11:00:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.

Lauren Williams took a job with Paper, one of the biggest virtual tutoring companies used by U.S. schools, because she wanted to help kids.

Williams, a self-described English and history buff who lives just south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, liked the work at first. As she helped students with their writing, it felt like students were getting personal attention they badly needed.

But as Paper ratcheted up the pace and volume of her tutoring assignments last year, Williams grew alarmed.

By this spring, she was routinely working with five students at once on the company’s online platform, which resembles a text-based instant messenger. She found herself toggling between kindergarteners learning to read and high-schoolers writing college essays, frantically trying to respond to each student’s message within Paper’s 50-second time limit.

Her breaking point came as Paper put new pressure on tutors to review essays faster — in part by recycling comments they’d written before.

“I was like: ‘No, I can’t do this,’” said Williams, who quit in March. That kind of help, she concluded, is “not doing what’s right by the kids.”

Lauren Williams

Tapping into the federal government’s historic investment in helping students recover from the pandemic, Paper has won contracts worth tens of millions of dollars telling schools it offers one-on-one tutoring with subject experts.

But the company often fails to deliver that basic service to students, a Chalkbeat investigation has found. In fact, tutors often juggle multiple students at once — a setup other virtual tutoring companies avoid — sometimes in subjects they don’t know well.

Paper argues that a student’s experience is always one-on-one, since students typically aren’t aware their tutor is working with others.

But the company’s practices and internal messaging suggest top officials know multi-tasking can be a challenge for tutors. It has even paid tutors “surge” bonuses of two to three times their normal pay rate for every minute they work with four or more students at once.

“At least when you’re in that stressful experience of having four kids in your classroom you know that you’re making double pay,” said Julia Drury, Paper’s senior director of operations, at a virtual company meeting last summer. “If you’re doing the work of two tutors, then you should be paid for the work of two tutors.”

School districts and state education agencies, meanwhile, are investing millions of COVID relief dollars in Paper’s services, sometimes none the wiser.

To report this story, Chalkbeat interviewed more than a dozen current and former Paper employees and reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, including screenshots of internal conversations among employees.

In an interview, Paper’s CEO, Philip Cutler, did not dispute Chalkbeat’s findings that tutors are often working with more than one student at a time and that tutors sometimes work with students on unfamiliar subjects.

But he maintains that Paper is delivering one-on-one tutoring because tutors who work with multiple students do so in separate, individual sessions.

“The student’s experience is one-on-one,” Cutler told Chalkbeat in June. “The tutor can be supporting multiple people. The idea is that the attention I’m getting is dedicated to me.”

Several school officials said they were not aware that Paper tutors were often working with multiple students at once until Chalkbeat told them.

“The department will follow up with Paper about this and continue to monitor, throughout the upcoming school year, if this practice has any impact on student engagement and/or satisfaction of services,” wrote Jean Cook, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Education, one of Paper’s largest clients, in an email to Chalkbeat.

Paper tutors juggle multiple students at once

As students fell behind during the pandemic, many researchers and education officials encouraged schools to tutor their students. That recommendation was backed by years of research that has found tutoring can deliver positive academic results, especially when kids get one-on-one help.

Amid staffing shortages, many school districts struggled to find and hire in-person tutors. That’s why many schools were drawn to Paper, which relies on 2,000 mostly part-time tutors who typically log on virtually from their homes across the U.S. and Canada.

Today the nine-year-old, Montreal-based company holds contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to tutor more than three million students in 600 districts across the U.S. and Canada. Much of that is backed by federal COVID relief money.

Chalkbeat previously found that Paper’s tutoring often goes unused, particularly by students who most need help. The company lost a contract earlier this year with the state of New Mexico, after officials there said Paper had failed to meet students’ needs.

Paper has told potential clients, like New Mexico, that it provides “a 1:1 student-tutor ratio.”

“We tailor instruction for each student,” Paper wrote to New Mexico education officials last fall in a proposal to work with the state. “With our 1:1 support, your students will receive the personalized attention they need.”

Paper issued this guidance to tutors to help them manage multiple students at once.

But Paper tutors often can’t do that, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former Paper tutors. The company’s employee handbook tells tutors they should be able to work comfortably with three students at once.

“We’ve found this to usually be manageable without sacrificing quality,” the handbook states. It adds: “there is no maximum number of students a tutor can be matched with simultaneously.”

Paper offers tipsheets for tutors meant to help them work with multiple students at once. One guide obtained by Chalkbeat tells tutors to ask students questions about what they want to work on to “buy you some buffer time to navigate between students.” Tutors can also “LET STUDENTS TAKE THE LEAD!” to make it “easier” to toggle between sessions.

Cutler said it’s rare for tutors to work with more than three students at once and that it only happens for short bursts of times, or “surges.”

Paper’s own data, provided to Chalkbeat by the company, shows that tutors spent 33% of their working hours over the last school year helping two students at once, 10% of their time helping three students at once, and just under 2% of their time helping four or more students. The rest of the time, tutors worked with one or no students.

But several tutors said those rates don’t accurately reflect their workload, which spikes in the mornings and afternoons. Internally, Paper has acknowledged that tutors who work in high-demand subjects like math experience surges of four or more students “on kind of an ongoing basis,” as Drury said at the virtual company meeting last summer.

One math and science tutor told Chalkbeat he’d helped a dozen students at once. Another math and science tutor said she’d gotten 10 students during a surge.

“You just keep switching tabs,” the tutor said. “I feel bad for some of these kids who are using the platform.”

Paper has resisted making changes that could cut down on tutor multitasking, such as adding a waiting room or scheduling option, because they could result in fewer students using Paper, according to a former manager who left Paper last year after several years with the company.

“The response to it was just like: ‘We don’t want to turn students away,’” said the former manager, who asked not to be named because they signed a confidentiality agreement with Paper that prohibits sharing details about the company’s internal operations. “The quality of the service was always secondary.”

Cutler said “that’s certainly not the case” and that Paper has been “very focused on delivering a high level of quality over cost.”

This kind of juggling is not the industry standard. Many other virtual tutoring companies offer intentional group sessions where students work together on similar assignments. Others conduct tutoring sessions over live audio or live video, which makes toggling between students nearly impossible. Paper does neither.

And other companies that offer text-based tutoring limit the number of students a tutor has at once.

TutorMe, for example, said its platform allows tutors to conduct only one session at a time. Varsity Tutors said when a student requests an on-demand tutor, a tutor can’t get another student “until the session is resolved.” Tutor.com said the maximum number of students a tutor can have at once is two, and that happens in only 2% of sessions.

“We NEVER work with multiple students in DIFFERENT individual sessions at the same time,” Mike Cohen, the CEO of Cignition, a California-based company that contracts with the Denver, Los Angeles, and Baltimore school districts, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat.

Figuring out how to run a tutoring program that delivers quality help to a significant number of students without breaking the bank remains a huge challenge for schools, especially as COVID relief funds dwindle. One of Paper’s biggest selling points is that districts can offer unlimited virtual tutoring to all their students at a fixed price. If lots of students use it, it can be less expensive than pricey in-person tutoring programs.

Experts say they understand how those competing needs drove some districts to select on-demand homework help, like the kind Paper offers, even though it does not have many of the hallmarks of effective tutoring.

“It’s easy to implement,” said Jennifer Krajewski, who helps schools choose evidence-based tutoring programs through a Johns Hopkins University initiative called ProvenTutoring. “And it doesn’t necessarily require shifts in schedules. Those are real challenges that schools are facing.”

But when districts express interest in virtual, on-demand tutoring, Krajewski said she cautions school leaders to ask about how many students tutors will work with at once, and what kind of relationship students will build with tutors. Several companies, including Paper, match students with a new virtual tutor every time they log on.

“A big part of why tutoring is so powerful is that human connection with somebody who cares about you,” said Amanda Neitzel, a Johns Hopkins assistant research scientist who works with schools through ProvenTutoring. “If you are doing a virtual model with somebody who is juggling two other kids, even in the best-case scenario, how much are you actually doing that?”

Some schools left in dark about Paper’s tutoring practices

Tutors have repeatedly told Paper that they worry the company’s advertising is misleading schools, internal records and interviews show. In March, one tutor asked on Slack, the company’s internal messaging platform, if Paper would stop saying it offers one-on-one tutoring on its website because “it has not been that way, according to many tutors.” A top manager defended the description.

“You are working with a student in an individual session!” Caroline Schwim, Paper’s senior manager of teaching and learning, wrote in response. “We are open with our districts about tutors working with multiple sessions which helps us remain affordable for them!”

Cutler says school districts are informed that tutors may be working with multiple students at once “through the sales process” and that “districts are fine with that.”

But the Mississippi Department of Education, which is paying Paper $10.7 million to tutor up to 350,000 students across the state, told Chalkbeat it did not know. A state official there said the department would talk with Paper about this practice and monitor whether it was affecting student engagement or satisfaction with tutoring.

Clarissa Trejo, a spokesperson for Fontana Unified schools in California, said the district “has never had a conversation regarding how many students a tutor would be helping at a time.” The district, which has paid Paper $1.9 million to tutor some 38,000 students, had no concerns about the quality of Paper’s tutoring, Trejo added.

Meanwhile, officials with Arlington Public Schools in Virginia and Los Angeles Unified told Chalkbeat they didn’t learn that tutors may help multiple students at once until after they had agreed to work with Paper and were putting the program in place. Still, a Los Angeles schools spokesperson said Paper is “an essential component” of the district’s plan for giving students “individualized instruction.”

Other school officials said they were aware before they hired Paper. Clark County schools in Nevada, which is paying Paper nearly $13 million to tutor 302,000 students, said the district found out in its initial conversations with Paper that tutors “may conduct simultaneous one-on-one learning sessions with multiple students.”

The Tennessee Department of Education, which has a contract with Paper worth up to $1.3 million, said its contract permits Paper tutors to work with up to three students at a time — a limit that doesn’t typically appear in other Paper contracts.

“We have received no complaints or evidence that Paper is violating their contract,” wrote Brian Blackley, a spokesperson for the state, in an email.

Paper tells tutors to Google their way through sessions

When students log on to Paper’s platform, they expect to be matched with a tutor who knows something about the subject they need help with. Paper says it employs “experts across K-12 subject areas” on its website, and that it gives tutors aptitude tests to vet their knowledge.

But in practice, several current Paper tutors said they are routinely matched with students who need help with subjects they don’t know. Tutors who feel stuck can transfer a student to a colleague with more expertise, but they can be fired if they do that too often.

Paper advises tutors to consult Google for help when they are paired with a student in a subject they don’t know well.

Paper has told uncertain tutors to buy time by asking the student a question while they essentially Google their way through the session.

“Even if you’re uncertain, give it a go,” Schwim told tutors last fall during a video training, according to a screenshot viewed by Chalkbeat.

The result looks something like what happened to Shannon Dickinson’s daughter, a high school junior in Las Vegas. Dickinson, a kindergarten teacher, had heard Clark County schools was offering tutoring through Paper, and she urged her daughter to give it a try when she was struggling with her pre-calculus class in January.

But each time the 11th grader logged on and showed a Paper tutor her math problem, she waited for a long time only to find out the tutor couldn’t help.

“It would be like 45 minutes later: ‘Sorry I can’t help you, I’m going to transfer you to someone else,’” Dickinson recalled. “Then she’d have to do the process again.” After several failed attempts to get help, Dickinson’s daughter told her: “This is not worth my time.”

When Chalkbeat told Dickinson that Paper’s tutors are told to Google their way through sessions when they’re stuck, she was stunned.

“Oh geez,” she replied. “Well, high schoolers can do that too!”

Wendi Dunlap, who worked for Paper for just over a year before she quit in March, has seen this play out from the tutor’s side. Earlier this year, Dunlap, an English and history tutor, got paired with a middle schooler with a math question. Dunlap tried to help anyway, following the company’s protocols. But when the student checked the work they’d done against an answer key, she reported back: “That’s completely wrong.”

Dunlap apologized and scrambled to transfer the student to a math tutor, but it was too late. The student had signed off.

“I felt so horrible,” Dunlap said. “It wasn’t fair to her.”

A math and economics tutor who’s been with Paper for four years said she once spent 45 minutes trying to convince her manager over Slack that she needed to transfer a high school student with a chemistry question that she had “zero clue” how to solve. To stall for time, she asked the student for their notes. Essentially, though, the student spent that time “doing nothing,” the tutor said.

“It’s just leading to the student getting more frustrated,” the tutor said. “This is not right.”

Cutler said scenarios like those are uncommon. The guidance Paper has given to tutors, he added, is similar to what teachers are expected to do if a student asks a question the teacher doesn’t know how to answer.

“I don’t dismiss the student, I say: ‘Let’s figure it out,’” Cutler said. “‘Let’s pull up the internet.’”

Paper advertises that it offers one-on-one virtual tutoring with subject experts on its website.

Paper also puts pressure on tutors to work quickly. Tutors are expected to respond to students within 50 seconds, internal records show, regardless of how many students they have at once or how complicated the student’s question is. Tutors who review essays are told to spend no more than 30 minutes per assignment, no matter how long it is. To do that, several tutors said they copy and paste pre-written feedback.

When tutors miss those targets, managers tell them to speed up. Tutors have been fired for failing to meet their marks, internal records show.

Internally, Paper officials have justified the time limits by saying they allow the company to charge less “so that even underfunded districts (those who need us the most!) can afford us,” Schwim wrote to employees in March, according to a screenshot viewed by Chalkbeat. The company has marketed its tutoring as a way to address inequities among students, “especially those from marginalized groups.”

Several tutors said the breakneck pace makes it harder to help students. One tutor, who left the company in January, said they got a urinary tract infection from skipping bathroom breaks as they tried to keep up with students. Two other tutors said they carried their laptops into the bathroom so they could keep working on the toilet.

“You couldn’t take your hands off the keyboard,” said the tutor who got the UTI, who asked not to be identified because they signed a non-disparagement agreement with Paper, a copy of which Chalkbeat viewed.

Cutler said tutors have told Paper that they take their computers into the bathroom to keep working, but that the company doesn’t “encourage” this practice. Paper recently instituted a “chime” to remind tutors to take their break, he added.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Dickinson figured out a way to get her daughter the math help she needed.

She dipped into her own pocket to pay for private tutoring.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Less than 1% of Philadelphia students are using the district’s tutoring programs

2023-06-01T18:00:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s free twice-weekly newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

Less than 1% of Philadelphia students are using district tutoring programs, even as test scores remain stubbornly low and pandemic recovery remains an urgent issue.

As of April, 1,230 students at 114 schools were participating in district-sanctioned, after-school tutoring funded by COVID relief aid. That’s less than 1% of the approximately 197,300 students in 329 charter and traditional public schools in the district, according to the latest available data.

Education experts say that high-dosage tutoring, where students meet in small groups with a regular tutor, is among the most effective strategies to accelerate learning and help struggling students reach their academic goals. But the lack of student participation in Philadelphia reflects a nationwide challenge: Even as schools spent billions of federal COVID relief money on tutoring, only a small fraction of students across the country received those services.

District officials aren’t sure why its tutoring program, which is free for the district’s K-12 students, isn’t reaching more of them.

Marissa Orbanek, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia school district, said the district recognizes its numbers haven’t been impressive, but said “we are eager to use the feedback from this first-year program to evolve it and make it better.”

“While we are glad we provided 1,230 students with access to free tutoring services that they never had access to before, with an initiative in its first year of implementation, there’s always room for improvement,” Orbanek said.

A survey of the nation’s largest districts by Chalkbeat and The Associated Press from earlier this year found some parents said they didn’t know tutoring was an option or didn’t think their children needed it. Some school systems found it difficult to hire tutors and others said they kept their tutoring programs small on purpose to focus on students with the greatest needs.

Orbanek said for next school year, the district is “focused on intentionally expanding our reach so as many students as possible” have access to the tutoring programs.

The district Office of Student Life, which oversees the program, will partner with tutoring vendors and other district offices, to “make improvements and increase access to and use of our centralized tutoring services,” Orbanek said.

“We also plan to increase overall awareness about the available programming and its benefits to students and to intentionally target specific schools based on student growth data,” Orbanek said.

But with federal COVID relief dollars — the primary way these tutoring programs were funded — set to expire in 2024, it remains unclear whether these efforts can scale before the money runs out. Philadelphia school officials have repeatedly pointed out that the district lacks the money to accomplish many of their goals.

According to district budget data for the 2022-23 school year, the district set aside up to $3 million for three tutoring vendors: Catapult Learning, Focus Care FEV, and Tutor Me Education. It also earmarked another $1.4 million for “in-person monitoring” of tutoring programs in schools.

The district has said it intends to use $350 million of its $1.8 billion federal COVID stimulus funds over four years — from 2022 to 2026 — on “an array” of pandemic recovery efforts including tutoring, summer learning programs, after-school programs, and before-care/school programs.

Catapult Learning was allocated up to $808,884, Focus Care FEV could receive up to $576,000 and Tutor Me Education was slated for up to $1,620,000. Representatives from Tutor Me Education and Focus Care FEV did not respond to requests for comment on their programs.

Vince Mazzio, who worked in the Philadelphia school district before becoming vice president of operations at Catapult Learning, said the situation in Philadelphia is comparable to what they’re seeing in other states.

“I’m encouraged with the numbers we’ve had,” Mazzio said in an interview. “It’s not been something where we’re alarmed at all.”

Mazzio said there’s an “early adopter versus late adopter” process that happens with tutoring programs and he thinks “we’re seeing that play out here.”

“In Philadelphia, parents are kind of saying, ‘Hey, who are these companies? What’s the program about? What can I expect? What can my kids expect?’ And so I think it’s a fairly typical kind of runway here,” Mazzio said.

The company meets with the district around once a week to brainstorm how to get more students enrolled and how to adjust the sessions to make them more flexible for families, Mazzio said.

Student participation has increased in the tutoring programs since the school year started. Between October 11, 2022 and November 28, 2022, for example, only 614 students participated in the tutoring program, district data shows.

But capacity isn’t the problem, he said.

“Nobody who comes to us is excluded,” Mazzio said. “We will find a spot for everyone.”

Still, Philadelphia also struggled to get students and families involved in tutoring before this school year.

During the 2021-22 school year, before Catapult and the other vendors secured contracts, only some 225 in grades 3-12 were “rostered” for tutoring services by district teachers in math and English in an after-school program, district spokesperson Christina Clark said in an email.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

High-dosage tutoring is still hard. Here’s what schools have learned.

2023-05-17T16:40:31+00:00

Christy Borders is frank about the “pain points” Illinois has faced while working to get an intensive tutoring initiative up and running.

Officials underestimated how much they’d have to pay tutors. Some schools offered tutoring after school, but few students attended. Even with training, tutors didn’t always use the tried-and-true strategies for helping students.

To course-correct, state officials boosted pay to $50 an hour, helped schools redesign their programs to offer tutoring during the school day, and coached tutors who needed support.

“The truth is that there are a lot of scabbed knees and bruises in this work,” Borders, who oversees the state’s tutoring effort, said at a conference held last week at Stanford University about the future of tutoring. “Not going to sugar coat this, guys. It’s hard work.”

Early in the pandemic, experts identified high-dosage tutoring — the kind that’s offered multiple times per week, in small groups, with a consistent tutor — as a potentially successful strategy for helping students plug learning gaps. But more than two years into a national push to expand the reach of tutoring, many schools are still struggling with basics, like how to staff and schedule their programs.

Now, as COVID relief funds dwindle, some big questions remain, including: What are the best ways to get high-dosage tutoring to more students? And how can schools keep their programs going when those federal dollars are gone?

A key group of researchers, school leaders, and tutoring organizations attempted to answer some of those questions at the recent convening hosted by the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford program that shares research and helps schools launch tutoring programs.

Here are some of the major takeaways from that event:

Some schools are ditching after-school tutoring

School leaders from New Mexico, Tennessee, Texas, and elsewhere said they tried to tutor students outside of regular school hours, but attendance was lackluster. As a result, some schools are changing their programs to offer extra help during the day — which typically involves overhauling school schedules.

“You have to blank slate it, start over, and redesign based on what is necessary for students,” said Penny Schwinn, the outgoing Tennessee education commissioner, who has overseen a statewide tutoring initiative that involves 87 districts and some 200,000 students. “For us, it is: Do the tutoring during the school day. That’s the only thing that has worked.”

In Tennessee, many schools are making that work by using academic intervention time that was set aside before the pandemic. Schools also are leaning on full-time tutors, who can make it easier to reach more students during school hours, Schwinn said.

Some districts had success changing elementary school schedules, but got tripped up trying to create classes for middle and high schoolers. In Ector County, Texas, school leaders slotted in virtual tutoring time at one middle school this school year and will be working that into the master schedules of more middle and high schools this fall. Doing that work in advance is key, educators said.

“We’ll hopefully have better attendance,” said Carina Escajeda, who oversees virtual tutoring for the district. “Those have been tough schools to really reach the students.”

There’s a push to use AI, but it’s unclear how much

Several researchers pointed to emerging evidence that has found schools can pair human tutors with software that uses artificial intelligence and still get strong results for students. That’s good news, they say, because it means schools could potentially offer tutoring to more students at a lower price.

In one recent study, for example, researchers found that ninth graders in Chicago and New York City who got daily math tutoring could spend about half their time with a tutor and the other half using a computer program and see results similar to students who spent an entire class with a live tutor. But there’s no consensus yet on exactly how much time students need to spend with a human tutor for it to remain effective.

“If we go too far it’s not going to be great,” said Jonathan Guryan, a professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University who was involved in that research.

Research is underway to see what the right balance may be. Though there’s broad agreement that students will still need a human connection.

“AI can support high-impact tutoring by making materials better, by giving tutors really good information on students,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford education professor who’s involved in numerous tutoring studies. “Most students are still likely to need relationships to get them to work on the AI platforms and to help them thrive more broadly.”

Schools are measuring effects of tutoring in different ways

While some state and district leaders are working with researchers to rigorously study their tutoring programs, others say that’s not practical and are turning to things like attendance data, test scores, and student surveys to see if tutoring has moved the needle for students.

Experts say while that kind of descriptive data can be helpful, it won’t show whether it was the tutoring that made a difference, or not.

“If you don’t have the data, you can’t say if it’s not working,” said Shanitah Young, a director with the North Carolina Education Corps, which recruits and trains tutors to work in schools across the state. The organization’s program is being evaluated by Duke and North Carolina State universities. “It’s allowing us to say ‘Yes, these students have grown through tutoring,’ or ‘No, they have not.’”

There are several studies that are expected to be published this summer and fall that could help school districts make their programs more effective. That includes two gold-standard experiments looking at whether the tutor’s race or gender affect academic outcomes for students, and another rigorous study looking at whether student group size affects the quality of live virtual tutoring in reading.

Schools are preparing for the fiscal cliff

Schools and states had to set aside a large chunk of their COVID relief funds to address pandemic learning losses, and many put that toward tutoring. Still, by some estimates, only 1 in 10 students or fewer are getting that extra help.

Now, as those funds run out, school districts are looking for alternate ways to pay for their tutoring programs, or planning for cuts — raising questions about how many more students schools will be able to reach.

Some states, like Tennessee, have budgeted money to continue paying for high-dosage tutoring after federal COVID funds expire, while others, like Connecticut, are ramping up data collection to lobby state lawmakers for ongoing tutoring dollars.

Meanwhile, some school districts, like Texas’ Ector County, will be deciding whether they should cut ties with some of their more expensive tutoring providers, while other districts, like Guilford County, North Carolina, are taking on some longer-term costs by staffing a four-person department to oversee their tutoring work.

“Money is about to get very, very tight,” said Robin Lake, who heads the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which has been tracking district academic recovery plans. “What we’re hearing from districts is they are overwhelmed by the challenge of core instruction. They can’t even get their heads around the idea of interventions and standing up new tutoring programs.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

It’s often hard to tutor students during the school day. A new initiative seeks to change that

2023-04-26T14:00:00+00:00

Many schools want to tutor students during the school day, when research shows they are more likely to benefit from the extra help.

But one roadblock continues to stymie school leaders: Students often can’t squeeze tutoring into their schedule.

A new $10 million initiative announced on Wednesday aims to change that by tapping five states to set up tutoring programs and develop model policies other states could copy.

The goal is to make it easier for schools across the country to get help to kids during the school day — at a critical time when COVID funds are winding down and many tutoring programs have reached only a small fraction of students.

“What we’ve seen is evidence showing that out-of-school tutoring just doesn’t have as high of an uptake,” said Kevin Huffman, the head of the nonprofit Accelerate, which awarded $5 million in grants to the states. “If you’re going to serve the highest-need kids, you have to figure out how to embed it during the school day.”

Each of the states that were chosen for the initiative — Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana, and Ohio — will spend $1 million of their own money and receive another $1 million from Accelerate, which was launched last year by the nonprofit America Achieves with the help of $65 million in private philanthropy. (That included money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which also funds Chalkbeat.)

Accelerate also is involved in two sweeping research efforts announced last year that are looking at tutoring initiatives across the country to identify programs that are worth schools’ time and money.

States in the newly announced initiative will tackle similar work.

That could include providing districts with advice on how to set up a school day to fit in tutoring for more students without running afoul of any state or federal rules. Or it could mean setting up better systems to track which students are getting tutored, how often, and whether the tutoring helped.

States may also assemble lists of companies that can back up their tutoring with research for districts to consult, and help districts draft contracts that require tutoring companies to demonstrate how they’ve helped students before they can get paid.

Some districts and states have cut ties with virtual tutoring companies that provide on-demand help, for example, after paying them millions in COVID relief funds only to find few students used the service.

“There are some programs and providers that haven’t delivered the kinds of results that they said they were going to deliver, whether that’s dosage, or attendance, or impact,” Huffman said. And some programs haven’t collected good data. “It’s really difficult for a district, especially a smaller district, to know who is good, and who is not good.”

The five states also will work with school districts to launch tutoring programs for elementary and middle schoolers in reading and math for the upcoming school year. It will be up to the school districts to decide who will staff those programs — Arkansas, for example, plans to use adults from the state’s tutor corps — but Huffman expects much of the tutoring work will be done in person.

The $10 million initiative may seem small compared to the billions schools received in federal funding during the pandemic, Huffman said, but Accelerate chose these states with an eye for coming up with policies that will support tutoring in the long run.

“Everybody is trying to figure out” what to do after the COVID relief funding runs out, he said. “Our hope is that, collectively, these five states working together will help figure out answers to some of these questions.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Tutoring isn’t reaching most students. Here’s how to vastly expand it.

2023-03-22T10:00:00+00:00

Tutoring was supposed to be schools’ secret weapon — a way to reverse pandemic learning loss before students fell even further behind.

But three years after COVID closed schools, and with the deadline to spend pandemic recovery funds fast approaching, many students still aren’t getting the help they need. By some estimates, just 1 in 10 students — or fewer — are receiving intensive tutoring.

The good news? Experts say it’s still possible to drastically expand tutoring. Millions more students can get the help they need, the experts said, if leaders are willing to do what it takes.

“There is an enormous need right now,” said Naeha Dean, chief strategy officer of Accelerate, a nonprofit that funds research on effective tutoring. “We really can’t wait.”

Chalkbeat asked a dozen experts how to ramp up effective tutoring. Here’s what they said:

Schedule tutoring during the school day

Most schools say they offer tutoring, yet few students actually receive it. Why?

One big reason is that tutoring is often held after school, which all but ensures low participation. Families must consent to after-hours tutoring and figure out transportation, and students must show up. Each step shrinks the pool of participants.

During-school tutoring side steps those challenges, allowing most students to attend. Students also tend to take tutoring more seriously during school than after, when programs often feature snacks and playtime alongside academics.

Most importantly, tutoring during school is more effective. A 2020 research review found that the academic impact of tutoring during school is roughly twice as large as tutoring after school.

“The science tells us that students are much more tuned in, plugged in, not fatigued, ready to engage, during the school day,” said Jen Mendelsohn, co-founder of Braintrust, which runs school tutoring programs.

It can be tough to squeeze tutoring into the school day, but experts say it’s possible by repurposing existing class periods or creating new ones. For example, the charter school organization Uncommon Schools shaved a few minutes off each period, freeing up 30-40 minutes each day for teachers to tutor small groups.

After-school tutoring just isn’t feasible for some families, said Juliana Worrell, Uncommon’s K-8 chief of schools. “So what we have concentrated on is incorporating tutoring into our actual school day.”

Turn school staffers into tutors

Many school leaders say they can’t find or afford enough tutors. Luckily, one solution is already in the building.

Nationwide, schools employ more than 880,000 paraprofessionals, or classroom aides, who assist teachers and support students with disabilities. That’s more than the number of principals, guidance counselors, and school librarians combined.

Often overlooked and underutilized, paraprofessionals can make great tutors, experts say. First, they are more racially diverse than teachers, which can benefit students. Second, they are already district employees, saving schools the time and cost of hiring outside tutors. Most importantly, they’re effective.

Tutoring studies have consistently found that paraprofessionals are second only to teachers in their ability to boost student learning. (The studies also count aspiring teachers as paraprofessionals.)

With “proper supports, such as good materials and coaching, they can be excellent tutors,” said Stanford professor Susanna Loeb, who founded the National Student Support Accelerator to expand access to high-quality tutoring.

If principals are eager to use classroom aides as tutors but not sure how, they can turn to companies like Once. The firm, which works with schools in about 10 states, provides training and a curriculum to help school support staff teach reading to kindergartners. The daily tutoring sessions are then recorded so Once coaches can review the footage with tutors and offer feedback.

The service is much less costly than hiring additional tutors, said Once CEO Matt Pasternack. And it has the added benefit of putting some paraprofessionals on the path to becoming teachers.

“By the end of one year with us, they’ve gotten 20 hours of coaching in the science of reading,” he said. “There’s a lot more to learn before becoming a classroom teacher, but it’s a great foundation.”

Tap other talent pools for tutors

Schools can also find an ample supply of would-be tutors outside their walls.

One natural talent pool is the country’s estimated 600,000 aspiring teachers. Before they begin student teaching, educators-in-training often spend extensive time observing K-12 classrooms. But some teacher training programs have started using that time for tutoring, which lets aspiring teachers gain experience while assisting students.

“Research is clear that practice matters for aspiring teachers,” said Patrick Steck, senior policy director at Deans for Impact, a nonprofit working to deploy more student teachers as tutors.

Local officials are finding solutions to the inevitable logistical challenges, Steck added. For example, some teaching programs have rescheduled classes to not conflict with tutoring, while some cities and school districts cover tutors’ transportation costs.

Other college students can also make great tutors, though making that happen can be a burden for schools. Several states have stepped in to help, launching programs that recruit, train, and pay college students to work as tutors. For example, California’s new College Corps fellowship is paying college students $10,000 to tutor K-12 students this school year. Interest was high, with about three undergraduates applying for every fellowship slot, according to the state.

Parents and caregivers are another source of tutoring talent. The parent-led nonprofit Oakland REACH shows how that can work. The group recruited parents during school dropoff and pickup, then paid them a stipend to attend a six-week training on how to teach reading. The parents, whom the group calls Literacy Liberators, are now district employees earning pay and benefits to tutor students during school.

“It starts with changing your mindset about how you see our communities,” said Oakland REACH CEO Lakisha Young. “We see our parents are very powerful — we see them as the change agents.”

Use virtual tutoring wisely

Virtual tutoring can be a godsend for schools. It lets harried administrators outsource the heavy lifting and, in theory at least, allows students to get help even from home.

But there’s a big problem with virtual tutoring: Many students never use it.

One of the most popular services, Paper, lets students chat with tutors by text message 24/7. But in several school districts, only a tiny fraction of the students who have access to the service use it. And struggling students who most need help are often the least likely to log on.

Programs where students and tutors meet by video after school have also struggled with attendance. For example, in Indianapolis, only about 1 in 3 students who signed up for after-school virtual tutoring attended more than one session, officials said.

But the good news is that virtual tutoring — when done right — can be highly effective, said Loeb, the education professor who has studied online tutoring.

“Some virtual programs show dramatic effects for students,” she said in an email.

The programs work best during the school day, with adults in the classroom supervising as students work with their virtual tutors, Loeb said. Students should attend several tutoring sessions each week, and tutors should receive coaching and high-quality materials.

“What makes a good virtual tutoring program,” Loeb said, “is very much the same as what makes a good in-person tutoring program.”

States and feds must step up

Creating large-scale tutoring programs is costly and complicated — and probably not the best use of superintendents’ time.

“You can’t just leave it up to 13,000 school districts to figure out,” said Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California education professor. “State and federal governments have to get more involved.”

There are several ways to do that, experts say.

States can vet tutoring providers, develop clear guidelines, and help with tutor recruitment. Sixteen states have gone even further and established their own tutoring programs, according to an analysis by the Council of Chief State School Officers.

The Biden administration launched a public-private partnership that promotes effective tutoring practices and provides technical assistance to districts. But experts say the federal government could do more to incentivize schools to offer tutoring and remove roadblocks. For example, federal work study rules could be expanded so more college students and aspiring teachers are paid for tutoring, according to a new Deans for Impact report.

Whatever officials do, they must move quickly, tutoring proponents say.

“Students are still in school and they are not receiving the betterment they’re entitled to,” said Mendelsohn, the tutoring provider. “This is their fundamental right.”

Kalyn Belsha contributed reporting.

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Online tutoring company Paper loses statewide contract in New Mexico

2023-03-17T17:45:27+00:00

In a swift reversal, New Mexico will no longer offer students virtual tutoring through Paper after state education officials said the company had failed to get enough students the academic help they needed.

New Mexico hired Paper last fall to provide on-demand virtual tutoring to students who attend high-poverty elementary and middle schools across the state. But Chalkbeat has learned that top officials at the Public Education Department, or PED, canceled the state’s contract after just three months, citing issues with how quickly Paper was able to enroll students in tutoring and how often students used those services.

“It is clear to the PED that this service is not providing the results in terms of engagement, support, or delivery of service to the State’s students,” New Mexico’s then-interim secretary of education, Mariana Padilla, wrote to Paper in a Feb. 20 letter terminating the state’s contract.

It’s unclear how many students Paper enrolled in tutoring, and the company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

New Mexico plans to replace the company with in-person tutoring, but has yet to get that up and running — leaving many students with a gap in support at a critical time for academic recovery. The about-face marks one of the highest-profile examples yet of a retreat from on-demand virtual tutoring, a model that exploded in popularity during the pandemic as schools found it challenging to staff and schedule tutoring sessions in person.

Paper, in particular, became a go-to provider for many of the nation’s largest school districts, including in Los Angeles, Boston, and the Las Vegas area, as well as the states of Mississippi and Tennessee. But reporting by Chalkbeat and other news outlets has raised questions about the utility of Paper’s virtual tutoring — which is primarily conducted over text-based chat and does not include video or live audio — especially for younger children, English language learners, and struggling readers.

In earlier interviews with Chalkbeat, Paper’s CEO Philip Cutler said his company was aware of some districts’ concerns and had stepped up outreach and added ways for students to communicate with tutors. Paper’s promise, he argued, remained its ability to serve large numbers of students.

New Mexico’s decision suggests that hadn’t yet happened. Allison Socol, a vice president at The Education Trust, an education civil rights group, said it’s commendable that officials made a change if they realized the on-demand virtual help wasn’t working.

“That doesn’t always happen,” Socol said. “This is a good moment to take stock of the interventions that districts and schools put in place in a moment of crisis and urgency and whether those are the right things.”

As COVID relief funds dwindle, education leaders should be looking at what’s working, Socol said, as well as “what isn’t working and what should we disinvest from so that those dollars can be allocated to things that will actually make a difference for kids.”

New Mexico signed a contract in late November with Paper worth up to $3.3 million funded by federal COVID relief funds. The state asked Paper to focus on the some 220,000 students in preschool to eighth grade who attend Title I schools, which serve higher concentrations of children from low-income families.

The contract set modest goals for the company, asking Paper to enroll at least 2,200 students in tutoring by the end of this month and to tutor at least 11,000 students by the end of the contract in September 2024. The state wanted each of those students to receive at least 20 hours of tutoring.

State officials wouldn’t say how far off Paper was from meeting those targets. A spokesperson for New Mexico’s education department, Kelly Pearce, said in a statement that the “PED’s partnership with Paper did not meet the needs of New Mexico’s students. As soon as this was determined, the contract was closed.”

It’s also unclear how much money the state spent on services it now says were inadequate. Pearce declined to answer questions about how much New Mexico has paid out to Paper. In her termination letter, Padilla indicated that Paper’s performance had been an issue since the beginning of the contract and that the state had previously expressed concerns. (Leadership at the education department had also been in flux during that period.)

Elsewhere, school leaders have had similar issues. In Hillsborough County, Florida, for example, the school district got a more than $500,000 refund from Paper after the company reached only a fraction of the students it had projected.

That hasn’t been the case everywhere, though. The Mississippi education department’s contract with Paper is still in effect and the state hasn’t had any concerns about the company’s performance, spokesperson Jean Cook said in an email.

In New Mexico, Paper beat out 17 other tutoring companies to win the state contract as part of a months-long competitive process. The state said it was open to a range of tutoring providers — including in-person, virtual, or a combination of the two — but Paper edged out its competitors in large part because it said it could do the job for the lowest price.

Some observers question why New Mexico officials thought opt-in online tutoring would be a good fit in a state where internet access has improved but is still limited, and where schools serve large shares of English learners, who often have trouble using Paper’s text-based platform.

Emily Wildau, a research and policy analyst at the nonprofit New Mexico Voices for Children, says that after chronic absenteeism shot up in the state during the pandemic, many students would benefit from more consistent tutoring that’s part of their school day.

“That kind of opt-in tutoring model is really good for the kids who are already doing pretty well,” Wildau said. “It’s not going to help the kids that are the farthest behind, who need the most attention in our state and who need to be re-engaged.”

In the meantime, students and families don’t have access to any tutoring through the state’s initiative. (Though the state continues to run a separate virtual tutoring program taught by New Mexico teachers for some 375 students in algebra I.)

In January, Lisa-Ashley Dionne signed up to get tutoring through Paper for her two daughters, who attend a Title I elementary school that was eligible for the extra help. But the service went away before her kids could use it.

Dionne wanted her fourth grader, who spent her entire second grade year online, to be able to work with a tutor on her Spanish conversation skills, since she attends a dual language school. She’s hoping Paper’s replacement will be more interactive.

“I’m just hoping for more of that conversation — just the back and forth interaction where they can engage more with the tutor,” she said.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Tutoring help reaches few students despite nationwide push

2023-03-10T11:30:00+00:00

This story is a collaboration with the Associated Press.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for our free newsletter to keep up with how public education is changing.

David Daniel knows his son needs help.

The 8-year-old spent first grade in remote learning and several weeks of second grade in quarantine. The best way to catch him up, research suggests, is to tutor him several times a week during school.

But his Indianapolis school offers Saturday or after-school tutoring — programs that don’t work for Daniel, a single father. The upshot is his son, now in third grade, isn’t getting the tutoring he needs.

“I want him to have the help,” Daniel said. Without it, “next year is going to be really hard on him.”

As America’s schools confront dramatic learning setbacks caused by the pandemic, experts have held up intensive tutoring as the single best antidote. Yet even as schools wield billions of dollars in federal COVID relief, only a small fraction of students have received school tutoring, according to a survey of the nation’s largest districts by Chalkbeat and The Associated Press.

In eight of 12 school systems that provided data, less than 10% of students received any type of district tutoring this fall.

A new tutoring corps in Chicago has served about 3% of students, officials said. The figure was less than 1% in three districts: Georgia’s Gwinnett County, Florida’s Miami-Dade County, and Philadelphia, where the district reported only about 800 students were tutored. In those three systems alone, there were more than 600,000 students who spent no time in a district tutoring program this fall.

The startlingly low tutoring figures point to several problems. Some parents said they didn’t know tutoring was available or didn’t think their children needed it. Some school systems have struggled to hire tutors. Other school systems said the small tutoring programs were intentional, part of an effort to focus on students with the greatest needs.

Whatever the reason, the impact is clear: At a crucial time for students’ recovery, millions of children have not received the academic equivalent of powerful medication.

“It works, it’s effective, it gets students to improve in their learning and catch up,” said Amie Rapaport, a University of Southern California researcher who has analyzed students’ access to intensive tutoring. “So why isn’t it reaching them?”

The Indianapolis school district last year launched two tutoring programs that connect students with certified teachers over video. One is available to all students after school, while the other is offered during the day at certain low-performing schools.

District officials say a trial run boosted student test scores. Parents give it high marks.

“The progress that he made in just a couple months last semester working with his tutor was kind of far beyond what he was grasping and doing at school,” said Jessica Blalack, whose 7-year-old, Phoenix, opted in to after-school tutoring.

Jessica Blalack watches as her son Phoenix, 7, works with a tutor on his laptop in his Indianapolis home.

Still, the two programs combined served only about 3,200 students last fall, or roughly 17% of students in district-run schools. Two additional tutoring programs operate at a handful of schools.

Only 35% of the students who registered for after-school tutoring last fall attended more than one session, according to district data.

Indianapolis Public Schools spokesperson Marc Ransford said the district is working to improve attendance and hopes to enroll more students in tutoring next school year. It’s also trying to accelerate student learning in other ways, including with a new curriculum and summer school.

Shaan Akbar, co-founder of the firm Tutored by Teachers, which runs the video tutoring programs, said his team is focused on maintaining quality.

“Trying to shoot for scale quickly is a recipe for disaster,” he said.

Nationwide, schools report that about 10% of students are receiving “high-dosage” tutoring multiple days a week, according to a federal survey from December. The real number could be even lower: Just 2% of U.S. households say their children are getting that kind of intensive tutoring, according to the USC analysis of a different nationally representative survey.

Schools trying to ramp up tutoring have run into roadblocks, including staffing and scheduling. Experts say tutoring is most effective when provided three times a week for at least 30 minutes during school hours. Offering after-school or weekend tutoring is simpler, but turnout is often low.

Harrison Tran, a 10th grader in Savannah, Georgia, struggled to make sense of algebra during remote learning. Last year, his high school offered after-school help. But that wasn’t feasible for Harrison, who lives 30 minutes from school and couldn’t afford to miss his ride home.

Without tutoring help, he started this school year with gaps in his learning.

“When I got into my Algebra II class, I was entirely lost,” he said.

Relatively low family interest has been another challenge. Though test scores plunged during the pandemic, many parents do not believe their children experienced learning loss, or simply are unaware. The disconnect makes it more important to offer tutoring during school, experts say.

“Parents just aren’t as concerned as we need them to be,” said USC education professor Morgan Polikoff, “if we’re going to have to rely on parents opting their kids into interventions.”

Even when students want the help, some have been let down.

In Maryland’s Montgomery County, 12th-grader Talia Bradley recently sought calculus help from a virtual tutoring company hired by the district. But the problem she was struggling with also stumped the tutor. After an hour trying to sort it out, Talia walked away frustrated.

“My daughter was no farther along,” said Leah Bradley, her mother. “Having an option for online tutoring makes sense, but it can’t be the primary option if you’re looking for good results.”

Repeated in-person tutoring tends to be more effective than on-demand online help, but it’s also harder to manage. District rules add complexity, with safeguards like tutor background checks and vendor bidding rules slowing the process.

In Wake County, North Carolina, the school district began planning a reading tutoring program last summer. The program did not launch until November, and district officials said last month that volunteers are tutoring fewer than 140 students — far fewer than the 1,000 students the program was designed to reach.

“We’re always looking to serve more students,” said Amy Mattingly, director of K-12 programs at Helps Education Fund, the nonprofit managing that program and another serving about 400 students. But, she added, it’s important to “see what’s working and make tweaks before trying to scale up and serve everyone.”

Sixteen states have established their own tutoring programs using a collective $470 million in federal COVID aid, according to an analysis by the Council of Chief State School Officers. But even those statewide programs have reached a limited number of students.

Ohio awarded $14 million in grants to more than 30 colleges and universities to provide tutoring in local schools. They served just 2,000 students statewide last fall, according to a state spokesperson, who said the goal is to eventually reach 10,000 students.

Some districts defended their participation numbers, saying tutoring is most effective when well targeted.

In Georgia’s Fulton County, 3% of the district’s 90,000 students participated in tutoring programs this fall. Most of the tutoring was offered by paraprofessionals during the school day, with one hired to give intense support in each elementary school.

The district says time and staffing limits how many students can get frequent, intensive tutoring.

“We don’t want to water it down, because then you don’t get the impact that the research says is beneficial for kids,” said Cliff Jones, chief academic officer for the system.

Others worry too few are getting the help they need even as programs continue to grow.

This school year, about 3,500 students are getting reading tutoring from the North Carolina Education Corps. Meanwhile, in fourth grade alone, more than 41,000 students statewide scored in the bottom level on a national reading test last year.

“Who we are serving,” said Laura Bilbro-Berry, the program’s senior director, “is just a drop in the bucket.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Marion County schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

Collin Binkley is an education reporter for the Associated Press.

Hochul’s 2023 education agenda: high-dosage tutoring, college access, student mental health

2023-01-10T18:14:53+00:00

Improving access to student mental health services, boosting school funding, and creating high-dosage tutoring programs figure prominently in New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s education agenda, according to her annual State of the State address on Tuesday.

Hochul’s speech — which governors use to signal their priorities for the coming year — outlined issues she’s shown interest in before, such as improving college access.

Her proposals, which come two months after significant drops on national reading and math exams, also show a deeper commitment to addressing how the pandemic impacted students both academically and mentally.

Still, her proposals don’t include some items that advocates were hoping to address this year in Albany, including hiring shortages, which Hochul prioritized last year.

Here are highlights from Hochul’s education policy proposals:

Hochul keeps pledge to fully fund Foundation Aid

As part of her budget proposal, Hochul confirmed that she will include a $2.7 billion increase in school funding for districts across New York under the Foundation Aid formula, which sends more money to high-needs districts.

Last year, state lawmakers had promised to spend billions of more dollars over three years to fully fund the long-debated formula, which accounts for most of the dollars that schools receive from the state.

This upcoming budget will represent the final phase-in of that money, and Hochul’s commitment to spend an additional $2.7 billion matches the funding request from the state’s Board of Regents, as well as a coalition of education-focused organizations called the Educational Conference Board.

High inflation rates ballooned the cost for this year from a $1.9 billion increase to $2.7 billion — raising concerns among some advocates about whether Hochul would stick to her word as the country is at risk for a recession.

“This historic level of financial support for New York public schools will reverberate for generations to come, broadening access to opportunity and enabling New York to build the education system of the future,” said Hochul’s book of policy proposals.

Several education organizations applauded Hochul’s plan. In a statement, Alliance for Quality Education, a school funding advocacy group, called it a “historic milestone for New York State’s public schools.”

Plans to make student mental health needs more accessible

As part of a broader effort to address mental health needs, Hochul has proposed to make school-based services more accessible to students and less expensive to open and run such programs in the first place.

Student mental health needs have been a large focus for educators and advocates since the onset of the pandemic. While many New York City schools offer some level of help to those with behavioral or mental health needs, educators and families report that the needs outpace what’s available, and many students are unable to access those resources.

More than one-third of New York City public schools have none of the six mental health programs that the education department touts on its website, according to an audit conducted last year by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

Hochul wants to increase the rate at which school-based clinics and other wraparound services are reimbursed by Medicaid, hoping that this will encourage providers to open more such clinics. She would also create annual grants that would help cover the costs of creating school-based services. Her proposal did not include more specific details, including how much money would be available for the grants.

Hochul also wants to introduce legislation that would require private insurance to pay the Medicaid rate for school-based services that students receive, since those insurance companies typically pay below the Medicaid rate, according to a spokesperson for the governor.

Charles Dedrick, executive director of the state Council of School Superintendents, applauded the proposal and described it as a “comprehensive plan” to expand and provide coverage for these services.

Hochul wants to invest in high-dosage tutoring

In order to address the academic effects of the pandemic, Hochul plans to invest $250 million of Foundation Aid money for districts to create high-impact tutoring programs, where students are tutored multiple times a week.

Mirroring national trends, New York saw steep drops in fourth grade math and reading scores, as well as eighth grade math, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, given for the first time last year since 2019.

Districts would use the money to establish the programs on their own or in partnership with an outside provider. These programs would specifically tutor students in grades 3-8 on reading and math.

Officials did not immediately respond to say how the money would be distributed or how much New York City would receive.

Researchers have found that students can do better in school when they’re tutored frequently in small groups. The endeavor is expensive, but an investment from the state could inject a boost to create such programs in New York City and elsewhere. Hochul’s policy book says that such programs “deliver increased instructional time and customized student learning, and establish meaningful relationships between tutors and students.”

One possible model in New York City is a CUNY-run tutoring program, where 800 of the school’s students studying to become teachers are working with struggling readers in first and second grade.

Creating a pipeline to higher education and the workforce

Hochul pitched a slew of proposals aimed to get more students into college and the workforce.

Under her plan, New York’s graduating high school seniors would receive admission to their local SUNY community college. Additionally, students who aren’t admitted to their SUNY school of choice would automatically be considered for admission at another SUNY campus.

She’s proposing to spend $20 million in grants for districts to create college-level courses in high school, through which students can earn college credit. The money would also go toward technology-focused programs – both in school districts and colleges – with the goal of preparing more students for such careers after graduation.

Priority for the grant money will be given to programs in high-needs school districts, as well as districts that plan to create programs focused on computer science and computer and software engineering pathways “with an eye toward the technology jobs of the present and future,” according to the proposal book.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Half of NYC students are behind in reading. Hundreds of CUNY tutors aim to change that.

2022-12-07T22:09:59+00:00

Just after the school day winds down, a group of three students at Brooklyn’s P.S. 40 sit in a semicircle and crack open “Looking for Lunch,” an illustrated book with large print. With help from a tutor, they begin reading aloud in unison, running their fingers along words like “hungry” and “animals” as they go.

Next door, a student is working with a one-on-one tutor and struggling with a more basic task: forming the word “tan” using small wooden blocks to represent individual sounds. He’s just beginning to grasp the relationships between sounds and letters.

In both classrooms, these first graders are behind their peers and at risk of joining the roughly 50% of city students who are not proficient readers by the time they reach third grade. To help catch them up, P.S. 40 is leaning on an intensive strategy: individualized tutoring at least three times a week.

The program pairs CUNY students studying education with New York City public school children who are struggling to master literacy skills. Known as the CUNY Reading Corps, the effort has grown into one of the largest tutoring initiatives involving pre-service teachers. This year, it’s projected to include more than 800 tutors and reach roughly 2,700 of the city’s public school children, primarily first and second graders.

Researchers have pointed to high-dosage tutoring as a tried-and-true method of reaching students who are struggling or were derailed by the pandemic. Catching up students who are behind — but still at widely varying skill levels — is a significant challenge in a typical classroom with dozens of students. Tutoring in small groups or one-on-one is one way of making that task more manageable, though it can be expensive and challenging to pull off on a large scale.

The Reading Corps program, launched in fall 2020, has helped ease some of those barriers. The idea came from Katie Pace Miles, a Brooklyn College professor and literacy expert who had two main concerns. For one, hands-on teaching opportunities for her education students were upended.

She also worried that more affluent families were able to marshal their own resources, launching learning pods or hiring tutors, creating even larger opportunity gaps compared with thousands of low-income children, many of whom struggled to access remote learning.

“Some children maintained, or gained, or accelerated,” Miles said. “And other children were left with shuttered school buildings and hybrid learning that wasn’t really working for them — and no additional support.”

A high-dosage tutoring program shows promise

The Reading Corps program helped address both of those problems, paying tutors in graduate or undergraduate education programs between $20 to $25 an hour to work with public school children for three to five sessions a week over about 13 weeks.

Before they begin working with children, the tutors receive between six and 12 hours of training in one of two reading programs, both of which include phonics lessons. Reading Ready, which Miles developed herself, is designed for students who are furthest behind, training them how to recognize foundational letter-sound relationships, form words by blending different sounds, and read basic sentences. The lessons typically last about 20 to 30 minutes.

The other program, Reading Rescue, is used across the city and is meant for students who can already recognize letters but are still below grade level. During the 30- to 45-minute sessions, children participate in step-by-step phonics lessons, read texts out loud, and respond to questions about what they’re reading. The lessons are typically delivered individually but sometimes include groups of up to three students.

Since the program launched in 2020, it has grown from 275 tutors to more than 800 at a cost of about $2.9 million for this school year and next summer, an effort that is largely foundation funded.

“Schools were very responsive” to the program, Miles said. “This really started out of urgency and need — and we were trying to go big.”

They initially provided lessons remotely, as the program launched when school buildings were still mostly empty. Even though campuses are now open, the majority of students still participate virtually, logging in from school buildings or from their homes outside of regular school hours.

A P.S. 40 student logs into a virtual tutoring session.

Still, there have been some challenges. Schools aren’t always excited about adding a virtual tutoring program, though Miles said it can be as effective as in-person tutoring. Online sessions also make it easier for tutors to arrive on time and reduce opportunities for viruses to spread. At P.S. 40, the school’s principal pays a teacher to help supervise the students who participate remotely.

Student attendance is not always high, a common stumbling block for tutoring programs. When the Reading Corps first launched, attendance was in the mid 60% range. Last year, attendance was closer to 70% and is now consistently above 70%.

“It takes some students longer to get through the program, just because they’re not always able to make their sessions,” said Erin Croke, CUNY’s director of literacy initiatives. “We really want to get them in and out,” she added, “so that we can then serve more students.”

City officials have said they want more students to receive the kind of systematic reading instruction offered through the Reading Corps program, and are requiring elementary schools to adopt phonics programs approved by the city. But those efforts to improve instruction will likely take time, necessitating remedial strategies in the interim.

“While we spend the time figuring that out, we need to provide students with this service,” Miles said.

CUNY officials say the program is showing signs of effectiveness. However, the tutoring program has not yet been studied rigorously, making it impossible to definitively say how effective it is. Miles said she is in the process of collecting data from student assessments to understand the program’s impact.

Outside experts who are familiar with the research on tutoring said the program is promising and should be studied carefully.

“The CUNY Reading Corps has all the design features that set a tutoring program up to succeed,” said Matthew Kraft, a professor of education and economics at Brown University who called for a national expansion of tutoring to help address learning disruptions caused by the pandemic.

Not all tutoring programs are created equal

At P.S. 40, an elementary school in Bedford-Stuyvesant where more than 90% of students are Black or Latino and 89% come from low-income families, the need for individualized help was clear, Principal Louise Antoine said.

Although challenges with teaching students to read are nothing new, kindergartners have been arriving further behind, unable to identify their letters. Fewer arriving kindergarten students had attended prekindergarten during the pandemic, one reason the principal surmised they were further behind.

“We noticed that a lot of our students are coming in, and they’re not ready to read,” Antoine said.

Antoine previously had mixed experiences with tutoring. The school experimented with a virtual program that students completed from home, but it was costly, the tutors didn’t have much training, and attendance among both students and tutors was spotty. But the Reading Corps program, she said, has been much more effective.

“The tutor has to be invested,” Antoine said. “The tutor has to be trained in how to support children in reading. I learned not every program has those qualities.”

Mary Escobar, an undergraduate student at Hunter College who is tutoring at P.S. 40, said she became interested in teaching literacy skills after helping a child with dyslexia she was babysitting. The CUNY Reading Corps jumped out to her as a chance to receive more formal training and practice in a public school setting.

Even though the Reading Ready lessons she’s delivering are highly regimented, not all of the sessions are a breeze. During a recent afternoon, a student named Kyrie was struggling to focus, squirming in his seat and playfully tossing tiny wooden cubes meant to represent sounds.

After some sessions, “I don’t get that feeling that we actually made progress” Escobar said, “and that’s a tough feeling.” But the goal isn’t just to deliver instruction — it’s also to help her figure out how to adjust and be a more effective teacher once she’s in the classroom full time.

CUNY student Mary Escobar embraces a student at the end of a recent tutoring session.

“I’ve wrestled with how important it is to get the kids focused and believing in themselves and getting positive reinforcement for their effort rather than just trying to get something done,” she said. “What I’m doing with these kids is going to help me down the line with so many other kids.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Schools across the U.S. have turned to Paper’s online tutoring. Some worry it’s falling short.

2022-11-17T16:45:15+00:00

Officials in Columbus City Schools were looking for a solution last year to some of the educational fallout of the pandemic — and they thought they found it in Paper, a popular virtual tutoring company that says it offers high-quality support for students at a lower price point.

The district spent $913,000 in COVID relief funds for Paper to provide its middle and high school students with access to 24/7, on-demand tutoring.

But Columbus quietly cut ties with the company in September because too few students were using the tool. District records obtained by Chalkbeat show that less than 8% of students with access logged on last school year. Half of those students used it just once. In some schools, not a single student logged on.

“I’ve had personal experience with it with my student,” school board president Jennifer Adair said of her rising seventh grader at a June meeting. “It was frustrating, and annoying, and she didn’t want to use it again.”

School districts across the country have spent millions in COVID relief dollars to purchase services from virtual tutoring companies to try to plug pandemic learning gaps. Paper, an eight-year-old company based in Montreal, has emerged as one of the most popular players in the market. It holds multi-million dollar contracts with some of the nation’s largest school districts and has splashy billboards in cities like Tampa and Chicago.

But educators and officials in districts that were among the first to contract with Paper say its text-based tutoring service often frustrates the students who need the most help, isn’t easily used by the youngest students, and can go unused altogether.

Philip Cutler, the co-founder and CEO of Paper, says the company has made several changes to respond to student and district feedback, with more in the works. Paper is piloting a voice notes feature aimed at helping younger children and English learners more easily use the platform. And the company has taken several steps to try to boost usage.

At a time when many students need academic help, Cutler says his company has proven it can deliver that on a large scale.

“It would be fantastic if we could have a tutor who sits next to a student for eight hours a day while they’re in class and helps re-explain everything to them,” Cutler said in a November interview. “Are we able to do that for 60 million students? I don’t think so. We need to make sure that there is something that actually can be applied to millions of students, that they can take advantage of.”

Still, schools’ reliance on programs like Paper worries observers like Allison Socol, a vice president at the education civil rights group The Education Trust who wrote a guide to spotting quality tutoring programs. Even with staffing challenges, she says, schools can do better.

“I am purposely not going to call it tutoring, because it’s not,” said Socol, of on-demand virtual help. “It doesn’t mean it’s not useful to some students. But is it useful at the scale that we need, and is it worth the amount of money that a lot of districts are spending? My gut says no, and a lot of the emerging data also says no.”

Why on-demand tutoring, and Paper, took off during pandemic

Paper traces its origins back to when Cutler saw firsthand how private tutoring can fuel academic inequities. While attending a teaching program at McGill University, Cutler ran a tutoring business that catered to children of wealthy families. “The other 90% needed the help the most but didn’t have the resources at home,” he said in an interview last year, “and no one was serving that side of the market.”

Cutler co-founded Paper in 2014, shortly after he graduated, and within four years the company had some district clients. But Paper really took off during the pandemic.

Schools, flush with COVID cash, wanted to offer tutoring to their students, but often struggled to staff and schedule those programs. Many districts couldn’t find enough teachers, who were often too exhausted and stressed to tutor for extra pay. And in a tight labor market, other adults were hard to recruit, too.

Paper offered a solution: It found and hired the tutors, and connected them to students whenever they needed help. Paper said its on-demand model could help schools reach struggling students who had to work or care for siblings after school, or who didn’t have a parent at home to help them with assignments.

“Paper aims to address the inequities facing all students, especially those from marginalized groups,” the company said.

Paper says it now works with 400 districts across the U.S. and Canada. Among its clients are four of the nation’s 10 largest districts: Los Angeles Unified, Clark County in Nevada, and Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties in Florida. Other big clients include the school districts in Boston; Prince William County, Virginia; and Jefferson County, Kentucky. Together, those contracts are worth $24 million and counting, records obtained by Chalkbeat show. (Los Angeles’ contract has yet to be finalized, Cutler said.)

Paper also holds statewide contracts worth $12 million total to provide virtual tutoring to students in grades 3-12 across Mississippi and to high schoolers in Tennessee.

Here’s how the service works: Students log on to Paper, type in a question, and get matched with a tutor. Students chat with the tutor over text message, and they can draw a problem on a virtual whiteboard. But the student can’t see or hear the tutor in real time, since there’s no live audio or video.

Even Paper’s marketing materials illustrate why that setup can be hard for some kids.

In transcripts of real tutoring sessions Paper provides to potential clients as “exemplary,” the company includes a session in which an elementary schooler needs help with basic math.

“I need help taking away,” the student types.

The tutor asks if the student knows why they’re having a hard time with subtraction.

“10000 - 0872,” the child responds. Drawing on the virtual whiteboard, the student reaches an incorrect answer: 2666.

“Can you explain what you did on the top with the 0’s?” the tutor asks. The student struggles to explain, starting with, “well I crossed it out.”

“Yeah! Do you know why you had to do that?” the tutor asked.

The student then left the session before getting guidance. But Paper noted they “left a glowing review for the tutor.”

Lucetta Holbert with her 14-year-old son, Zion Holbert, inside Berwick Alternative K-8 School in Columbus. Zion used Paper last year to get feedback on a writing assignment, but did not use it again.

Costs balloon when few students use Paper’s online tutoring

In Columbus, 14-year-old Zion Holbert used Paper last year to get feedback on a writing assignment comparing themes in “The Hunger Games” books to historical events. He found the site confusing at first, but eventually he figured out how to upload his work and he took some of the tutor’s editing suggestions.

His mother, Lucetta Holbert, appreciated how quickly the feedback came in. “It was really nice because I’m not a really good writer,” she said, “so that took the pressure off me to try to figure out how to do all this comparing and contrasting.”

But Zion never tried Paper again, though he was struggling with some math concepts, like fractions, that he learned when school was remote. When he wanted math help, he’d stay after school to review problems with his homeroom teacher or visit the library to work with a volunteer tutor.

His advice to other students? Paper can be helpful for English class, “if you’re stuck and you got work you want someone to read and you’re at home.” But if you have a more complicated question, seek out a teacher at school. “In person, you can just show them and they can help you,” Zion said.

One of Paper’s biggest selling points is that districts can offer unlimited virtual tutoring to many students at a fixed price. A Chalkbeat review of 13 recent district contracts show the cost per student can range from $21 to $183, though the median price was around $40. (Cutler says rates vary based on district size, contract length, and how much help the district needs to get started.)

But when students like Zion don’t return to the service or don’t use Paper at all, the true per-student cost is much higher.

Zion Holbert, 14, studies at Berwick Alternative K-8 School in Columbus.

Paper charged Columbus schools $38 per student for tutoring access, but district officials noted that the cost ballooned to $446 per student who actually used the service.

Santa Ana Unified in California paid Paper over $1.1 million last year to provide access to nearly 41,000 students. But just over 1,000 students logged on for tutoring or essay help from December 2021 to May, district records show, ultimately costing the district nearly $1,100 per child. (The district is no longer using Paper.)

Cutler says he believes Paper’s product is worth the cost when the number of help sessions roughly equals the number of students with access to the tool. Even by that generous standard — which can count the same student multiple times — the company often falls short.

In Hillsborough County, Florida, around 16,000 students used Paper from September 2021 to this September, or just under 14% of the middle and high schoolers with access. Those students logged around 47,000 tutoring sessions and essay reviews, district officials said — less than half of what Paper had projected. The usage was so off that the company ended up owing the school district over half a million dollars.

Usage looked similar in Palm Beach County, Florida. Some 104,000 middle and high schoolers had access to Paper, and they completed around 53,000 tutoring and essay review sessions last school year, district records show. That was within the projection in the district’s contract, but under what the company considers a good deal.

But school board members there had another concern: students from high-poverty schools used Paper less than their peers at more affluent schools.

Paper says usage rates improve when the company and district make concerted efforts to reach out to teachers, students, and families to tell them about the service. But others say the numbers reflect a problem baked into Paper’s opt-in model.

“It’s not necessarily the virtual part of it,” said Socol of The Education Trust. “Online homework help puts the responsibility on the student to say: ‘I don’t understand this individual question on my homework, let me reach out to a potentially random adult who I don’t have a relationship with.’”

Research released last month seems to back that up. In California’s Aspire charter school network, only 1 in 5 of the middle and high school students in the study used Paper in spring 2021. But higher-achieving students were almost twice as likely to use the platform as students who’d gotten at least one D or F the prior semester — the exact students the charter network had hired Paper to help.

More struggling students did try Paper when school leaders urged them and their parents to do so, but “take-up remained low,” the researchers wrote.

“If you expect them to bring their questions to the tutoring, that’s very difficult, too, because many students don’t quite know what they understand or don’t,” said Susanna Loeb, an education professor at Brown University who co-authored the study. “As a strategy for supporting students in need, it’s not a good strategy.”

Jillian Eichenauer, a middle school math teacher at an Aspire school just south of Los Angeles, has seen that in her classroom. Last year, she had her eighth graders redo problems they got wrong on their tests with Paper, but she didn’t turn to the tool if they were struggling with a concept, like writing an equation.

“I usually try to direct them to do that when it’s like a check for your answer, rather than get help,” Eichenauer said. “Some of them require re-teaching, which Paper is not very beneficial for.”

Paper’s shortcomings for young kids, English learners

Young students and students learning English as a new language have an especially hard time using Paper, educators say, though the company markets itself as being accessible to both. Paper employs tutors who can speak Spanish, French, and Mandarin, which has been a draw for many district clients.

But in several places, usage was especially low for those two groups of students. In Santa Ana Unified, a mostly Latino district where 40% of students are English learners, just four students used Paper in Spanish, data provided by the district for last school year show. No first or second graders logged on, and only two third graders did.

In Palm Beach County, only about 1% of tutoring and essay help sessions were conducted in a language other than English last school year, though 11% of students who had access were English learners.

Several districts, including Boston, Clark County, and Los Angeles, are paying Paper to use with children as young as 5, though experts in early literacy say kindergartners and first graders typically aren’t able to read and respond to a virtual tutor over text-based chat. Struggling readers in second grade are likely to have trouble, too.

Amanda Samples, the executive director of academic support and school improvement for DeSoto County schools in Mississippi, which uses Paper in grades 3-12 through the state’s initiative, says that when she reviews tutoring session logs, she can tell some younger students don’t realize the virtual tutor is a real person.

A student “might say: ‘I need help with vocabulary,’ and so the tutor will ask a question back, and then they may just not respond,” Samples said.

In Chicago’s west suburbs, middle school teacher Hannah Nolan-Spohn has used Paper to help English learners practice their conversation skills. But some have found the platform challenging without a voice option. The speech-to-text feature hasn’t helped much, either.

“The bot doesn’t always understand what it is that they’re trying to say,” Nolan-Spohn said, “and then they get frustrated.”

Paper officials have acknowledged the challenges English learners and younger students might face with the platform.

Paper makes changes as more schools seek online tutoring

Paper has acknowledged some of its shortcomings and says it’s working to improve.

“We realized for the younger students, in particular, they don’t necessarily have the ability to sit in a live chat,” Cutler told Chalkbeat earlier this summer, acknowledging that setup can be challenging for students with disabilities and English learners, too. “They’re just learning a language.”

As a fix, the company introduced a voice notes feature in Los Angeles’ schools this fall. It allows students to upload a recording of themselves speaking, but they still can’t have a live two-way conversation with a tutor. Cutler said it’s shown promise so far, and students who use the voice memos are more likely to return to the service. Paper intends to test it out in Boston before making it widely available next year.

Many virtual tutoring competitors now have live audio and video options, but Cutler says Paper doesn’t plan to change that part of its model because student focus groups haven’t shown a demand for that.

The company says it’s also stepped up efforts to make students and families aware of its services, running contests with prizes for schools that use Paper a lot and hiring staff who train teachers and demonstrate the tool for students.

Asked why students from high-poverty schools used Paper less, Cutler said that challenge is not unique to Paper. The company has worked with some districts, such as Clark County, to launch virtual tutoring in high-need schools first.

“What we need to do, and we are doing, is really focusing a lot of the messaging on: How do you support students who don’t really trust the system?” Cutler said this summer. “They are not the first ones to say, ‘Hey I think this is going to help me.’”

In the meantime, school districts are deciding how long they should give Paper to prove its worth as the deadline for spending federal COVID funds looms. Earlier this month, for example, the Hillsborough County school board renewed its contract for 10 months at a significantly reduced rate after raising concerns about low usage rates. District officials said they’d drop Paper if the plan to get more students logging on didn’t work.

“This is a lot of money,” Superintendent Addison Davis said, adding he wanted “to make certain that we’re getting the return on investment.”

How effective Paper is at helping students also remains an open question. The Aspire study found that when students and families got extra nudges to use Paper, and did, those students were 4 percentage points more likely to pass all their classes. Paper is involved in other ongoing research, but there’s not much else to go on for now.

Cutler maintains that Paper is “a critical piece to recovery.”

“I would 100% disagree with the fact that it’s not a solution that can address learning losses,” he said. “It absolutely is. And it’s being used that way by districts across the country.”

Leaders in districts like Mississippi’s Jefferson County schools are banking on it. Superintendent Adrian Hammitte jumped on the chance to use Paper through the state’s initiative.

“Coming from a school district with not many resources,” he said, “with it being free and offering 24/7 support, I was pretty much sold.”

Elsewhere in Mississippi, districts are using Paper to approximate “high-dosage tutoring” — a highly effective strategy in which students attend multiple tutoring sessions per week, during the school day. Cutler and the company’s marketing materials say Paper can be used in a high-dosage way, though its model is missing key components of that research-backed strategy, such as providing students with a consistent tutor.

Others say the kind of help Paper offers isn’t enough to catch up struggling students — and the fact that so many districts have turned to it raises questions about the country’s capacity to truly help the students who need it most.

Tony Solina, who oversees 16 Aspire schools in California, says it’s unrealistic to think Paper is going to “close the learning loss gap” the way most schools use it. His strategy to do that was to make sure the schools he manages had an after-school program staffed by educators who build relationships with students and their teachers.

“That’s, to me, the gold standard,” he said. “I don’t believe any online system is going to do better than or trump that.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Here are the tutoring programs available to Indianapolis students and how to access them

2022-11-01T12:00:00+00:00

Families looking for tutoring services in Indiana might have more easily accessible options than ever before.

Multiple tutoring programs have rolled out this year to help students catch up on the critical math and reading skills they lost or didn’t gain during the pandemic, fueled by millions in federal relief dollars earmarked for academic makeup.

Indiana is not alone in turning to tutoring. And the approach might get still more attention after recent test scores showed a decline in math and reading performance.

Indiana students’ scores on the National Assessment Educational Progress — or NAEP — showed a not-unexpected decline from 2019. Students’ scores on the state test, the ILEARN, also dropped sharply from 2019 to 2021, before showing a slight rebound in 2022.

While outside tutoring has always been an option, more and more schools are trying targeted “high dosage” tutoring that pairs a few students with one regular tutor — an approach that has been linked to strong results.

Some of the programs are virtual, and some studies suggest that format holds promising outcomes as well.

The new programs also aim to give more families access by providing the funding. Some are free to families through their schools or the city of Indianapolis, while one provides parents up to $1,000 to spend on tutoring through a provider of their choice.

Here are four programs available to Indianapolis students and how to sign up.

Virtual after-school tutoring for all IPS students

Indianapolis Public Schools is offering free virtual tutoring after school for all students at district-run schools. The program is offered through Tutored by Teachers. Students will meet virtually in small groups with a teacher for one hour each of math and English instruction.

Tutoring for the fall semester began on Oct. 3, but the application will reopen on Nov. 28 through Dec. 20 for the spring semester. More information is available here.

Virtual in-class tutoring for certain IPS schools

IPS also announced in July that it would expand virtual tutoring during the school day to more low-performing schools. Students are part of the program automatically if they attend the district’s emerging schools, which have low NWEA test scores and consecutive failing grades from the state.

Anna Brochhausen School 88
Brookside School 54
Charles Warren Fairbanks Schools 105
Christian Park School 82
Clarence Farrington School 61
Eleanor Skillen School 34
George S Buck School 94
H. L. Harshman Math/Science & World Languages Magnet
James Russell Lowell School 51
James Whitcomb Riley School 43
Northwest Community Middle School
Ralph Waldo Emerson School 58

Indiana Learns grants for 4th and 5th graders

Indiana is offering grants of at least $500 for fourth and fifth grade students who qualify for subsidized meals and who tested below proficiency on both sections of last year’s state assessment. But students who are enrolled in certain school districts could qualify for a matching grant and have up to $1,000 to spend on math and reading tutoring services.

That list of school districts initially included Gary, Greenwood, Knox, Penn-Harris-Madison, Mishawaka, and Wawasee, and will be updated soon, according to the state Department of Education.

Indiana Learns launched on Oct. 15. Families can check their child’s eligibility and sign up for services here.

Circle City Readers

Unveiled by Indianapolis on Oct. 11, Circle City Readers is intended to provide reading help for students in kindergarten through third grade. Those students will meet with a tutor several times per week in small groups for literacy instruction at locations throughout the city, according to the Circle City Readers website. The city is funding the one-year program using $1 million in federal emergency money, and seeks to serve around 1,000 students in Marion County.

The program is set to launch in 2023, but families can indicate their interest via an online form.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Sweeping research effort tackles big question: How to get tutoring that works to more kids

2022-10-27T18:05:14+00:00

Tutoring is one of the most popular strategies for helping students catch up in the wake of the pandemic. But cost, staffing, and scheduling challenges often make it hard for schools to get these programs off the ground.

A sweeping $10 million research effort announced Thursday aims to tackle that problem by studying 31 different tutoring initiatives across the country this school year. The goal is to answer some of the biggest open questions about how schools can put successful tutoring programs in place for more students — and then figure out if they worked.

“It feels like out in the education ecosphere people are sort of yelling at districts and saying: ‘Why aren’t you doing more?’” said Kevin Huffman, the head of Accelerate, a nonprofit that awarded the grants. Districts are trying, he said, but it’s been complicated to staff in-person programs and difficult to vet tutoring services run by outside companies.

The research has the potential to help schools know which tutoring efforts are worth their time and money — before their COVID relief funding runs out.

“I think we’ve delivered the message collectively to the field that tutoring benefits all students, which is true based on the research, but it’s not a useful message when it comes to implementation,” Huffman added. “It’s just too broad and overwhelming, and I think the more we can help people narrow the scope on how to get started, the more likely we are to get traction.”

The research will look at tutoring efforts that are in-person, virtual, and a combination of the two. Accelerate expects some of the research will be available as early as next summer, while other studies will take more time.

Some of the research efforts are large, high-profile initiatives, such as the partnership between Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, which is studying the effects of tutoring and other academic recovery strategies on some 700,000 students across six states. Other studies will look at smaller efforts, like a student-launched virtual tutoring program called Tutor Teens that will partner with four high schools in the Cincinnati area.

Accelerate was launched earlier this year by the nonprofit America Achieves, which initially raised $65 million for the effort from private philanthropy — Arnold Ventures; the head of Citadel, Kenneth C. Griffin; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and the Overdeck Family Foundation. (Chalkbeat also receives funding from the Gates Foundation.)

The nonprofit received more than 200 interested applicants, and tried to choose initiatives that were different from each other so the research would cover lots of ground. Accelerate also looked for efforts that zeroed in on specific student groups, such as English learners and struggling readers.

Some winners already have a proven track record, while others are start-ups that showed promise, Huffman said. The grants range in size from $100,000 to $800,000.

“A lot of these groups and organizations are taking first stabs at things that will need to be studied more,” Huffman said. “But our hope is that we’re starting down this path where instead of simply asking the question of whether tutoring works, we’re getting at the question of what are practical solutions” for getting that help to many more students.

The programs being studied include:

Amira Learning, a company that uses artificial intelligence to help students with literacy. The research will look at the effectiveness of pairing Amira’s virtual platform with in-person reading tutoring provided by young adults in California’s Central Valley to struggling elementary schoolers.
Amplify, a literacy tutoring company. The research will look at how a student’s race, gender, and language can affect the quality of a student-tutor match.
Deans for Impact, a nonprofit focused on teacher training, which will work with teacher prep programs to train and pair aspiring teachers with students who need tutoring, with a focus on math.
Guilford County Schools in North Carolina, which has an in-person tutoring program that targets high-need students in math, reading, and science. The research will look at how providing extra support to tutors can affect their relationships with students and student performance.
Great Oaks Foundation, which will recruit and train young people to be placed in schools for a year to tutor students in math and reading through AmeriCorps.
Green Dot Public Schools, a charter network in California, which will expand its math tutoring program for middle and early high schoolers and work with the company Saga Education to provide tutors with more feedback on their work.
Matheka, a math tutoring company, which will recruit and train bilingual tutors from Latin America to provide English learners who speak Spanish with virtual tutoring in elementary school. The research will look at the effects on their math scores.
OnYourMarkEducation, a virtual literacy tutoring program, will work with the National Student Support Accelerator to conduct randomized control trial studies looking at whether different tutor-to-student ratios affect student performance.
Reading Partners, a nonprofit that’s been shown to provide effective literacy tutoring, will conduct a randomized control trial of the virtual version of its in-person program.
Teach for America will look at the effects of its program that uses college students to provide virtual tutoring to elementary schoolers in reading and middle schoolers in math.
Zearn, a virtual math tutoring company being used by the Tennessee education department to offer tutoring to half the state’s elementary and middle school students, will use preliminary data to look at student outcomes.

Huffman hopes the research will help show whether it’s possible to train high schoolers, parents, college students, and pre-service teachers to effectively tutor students in large numbers. Many schools would prefer to offer tutoring in person, but have faced major challenges finding enough staff locally.

There are a few other trends, too. As more schools look to put programs in place that follow the science of reading, several grantees are looking at the effectiveness of virtual early literacy tutoring.

Other research efforts aim to determine the right balance between in-person and virtual support.

“Broadly, we don’t have a great handle across the country yet on: What happens if you go from in person to Zoom?” Huffman said. “What are the ways that reduce the lift on in-person? Can you find those things without reducing the statistically significant impacts that tutoring in-person shows?”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.