Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, was an early proponent of giving tutors — ordinarily a luxury for the rich — to the masses after the pandemic. The research evidence was strong; more than a hundred studies had shown remarkable academic gains for students who were frequently tutored every week at school. Sometimes, they caught up two grade levels in a single year. 

After Covid shuttered schools in the spring of 2020, Kraft along with a small group of academics lobbied the Biden administration to urge schools to invest in this kind of intensive tutoring across the nation to help students catch up from pandemic learning losses. Many schools did — or tried to do so. Now, in a moment of scholarly honesty and reflection, Kraft has produced a study showing that tutoring the masses isn’t so easy — even with billions of dollars from Uncle Sam. 

The study, which was posted online in late August 2024, tracked almost 7,000 students who were tutored in Nashville, Tennessee, and calculated how much of their academic progress could be attributed to the sessions of tutoring they received at school between 2021 and 2023. Kraft and his research team found that tutoring produced only a small boost to reading test scores, on average, and no improvement in math. Tutoring failed to lift course grades in either subject.

“These results are not as large as many in the education sector had hoped,” said Kraft in an interview. That’s something of an academic understatement. The one and only positive result for students was a tiny fraction of what earlier tutoring studies had found.

“I was and continue to be incredibly impressed with the rigorous and wide body of evidence that exists for tutoring and the large average effects that those studies produced,” said Kraft. “I don’t think I paid as much attention to whether those tutoring programs were as applicable to post-Covid era tutoring at scale.”

Going forward, Kraft said he and other researchers need to “recalibrate” or adjust expectations around the “eye-popping” or very large impacts that previous small-scale tutoring programs have achieved.

Kraft described the Nashville program as “multiple orders of magnitude” larger than the pre-Covid tutoring studies. Those were often less than 50 students, while some involved a few hundred. Only a handful included over 1,000 students. Nashville’s tutoring program reached almost 7,000 students, roughly 10 percent of the district’s student population. 

Tennessee was a trailblazer in tutoring after the pandemic. State lawmakers appropriated extra funding to schools to launch large tutoring programs, even before the Biden administration urged schools around the nation to do the same with their federal Covid recovery funds. Nashville partnered with researchers, including Kraft, to study its ramp up and outcomes for students to help advise on improvements along the way. 

As with the launching of any big new program, Nashville hit a series of snags. Early administrators were overwhelmed with “14 bazillion emails,” as educators described them to researchers in the study, before they hired enough staff to coordinate the tutoring program. They first tried online tutoring. But too much time and effort was wasted setting kids up on computers, coping with software problems, and searching for missing headphones. Some children had to sit in the hallway with their tablets and headphones; it was hard to concentrate. 

Meanwhile, remote tutors were frustrated by not being able to talk with teachers regularly. Often there was redundancy with tutors being told to teach topics identical to what the students were learning in class. 

The content of the tutoring lessons was in turmoil, too. The city scrapped its math curriculum midway. Different grades required different reading curricula. For each of them, Nashville educators needed to create tutor guides and student workbooks from scratch.

Eventually the city switched course and replaced its remote tutors, who were college student volunteers, with teachers at the school who could tutor in-person. That eliminated the headaches of troublesome technology. Also, teachers could adjust the tutoring lessons to avoid repeating exactly what they had taught in class. 

But school teachers were fewer in number and couldn’t serve as many students as an army of remote volunteers. Instead of one tutor for each student, teachers worked with three or four students at a time. Even after tripling and quadrupling up, there weren’t enough teachers to tutor everyone during school hours. Half the students had their tutoring sessions scheduled immediately before or right after school.

In interviews, teachers said they enjoyed the stronger relationships they were building with their students. But there were tradeoffs. The extra tutoring work raised concerns about teacher burnout.

Despite the flux, some things improved as the tutoring program evolved. The average number of tutoring sessions that students attended increased from 16 sessions in the earlier semesters to 24 sessions per semester by spring of 2023. 

Why the academic gains for students weren’t stronger is unclear. One of Kraft’s theories is that Nashville asked tutors to teach grade-level skills and topics, similar to what the children were also learning in their classrooms and what the state tests would assess. But many students were months, even years behind grade level, and may have needed to learn rudimentary skills before being able to grasp more advanced topics. (This problem surprised me because I thought the whole purpose of tutoring was to fill in missing skills and knowledge!) In the data, average students in the middle of the achievement distribution showed the greatest gains from Nashville’s tutoring program. Students at the bottom and top didn’t progress much, or at all. (See the graph below.)

“What’s most important is that we figure out what tutoring programs and design features work best for which students,” Kraft said. 

Average students in the middle of the achievement distribution gained the most from Nashville’s tutoring program, while students who were the most behind did not catch up much

Another reason for the disappointing academic gains from tutoring may be related to the individualized attention that many students were also receiving at Nashville’s schools. Tutoring often took place during frequently scheduled periods of “Personalized Learning Time” for students, and even students not selected for tutoring received other instruction during this period, such as small-group work with a teacher or individual services for children with special needs. Another set of students was assigned independent practice work using advanced educational software that adapts to a student’s level. To demonstrate positive results in this study, tutoring would have had to outperform all these other interventions. It’s possible that these other interventions are as powerful as tutoring. Earlier pre-Covid studies of tutoring generally compared the gains against those of students who had nothing more than traditional whole class instruction. That’s a starker comparison. (To be sure, one would still have hoped to see stronger results for tutoring as the Nashville program migrated outside of school hours; students who received both tutoring and personalized learning time should have meaningfully outperformed students who had only the personalized learning time.)

Other post-pandemic tutoring research has been rosier. A smaller study of frequent in-school tutoring in Chicago and Atlanta, released in March 2024, found giant gains for students in math, enough to totally undo learning losses for the average student. However, those results were achieved by only three-quarters of the roughly 800 students who had been assigned to receive tutoring and actually attended sessions.*

Kraft argued that schools should not abandon tutoring just because it’s not a silver bullet for academic recovery after Covid. “I worry,” he said, “that we may excuse ourselves from the hard work of iterative experimentation and continuous improvement by saying that we didn’t get the eye-popping results that we had hoped for right out of the gate, and therefore it’s not the solution that we should continue to invest in.”

Iteratively is how the business world innovates too. I’m a former business reporter, and this rocky effort to bring tutoring to schools reminds me of how Levi’s introduced custom-made jeans for the masses in the 1990s. These “personal pairs” didn’t cost much more than traditional mass-produced jeans, but it was time consuming for clerks to take measurements, often the jeans didn’t fit and reorders were a hassle. Levi’s pulled the plug in 2003. Eventually it brought back custom jeans — truly bespoke ones made by a master tailor at $750 or more a pop. For the masses? Maybe not. 

I wonder if customized instruction can be accomplished at scale at an affordable price. To really help students who are behind, tutors will need to diagnose each student’s learning gaps, and then develop a customized learning plan for each student. That’s pricey, and maybe impossible to do for millions of students all over the country. 

*Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated how many students were assigned to receive tutoring in the Chicago and Atlanta experiment. Only 784 students were to be tutored out of 1,540 students in the study. About three-quarters of those 784 students received tutoring. The sentence was also revised to clarify which students’ math outcomes drove the results.

This story about tutoring research was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post Students aren’t benefiting much from tutoring, one new study shows appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Four years after the pandemic shuttered schools, we all want to be done with COVID. But the latest analyses from three assessment companies paint a grim picture of where U.S. children are academically and that merits coverage. While there are isolated bright spots, the general trend is stagnation. 

One report documented that U.S. students did not make progress in catching up in the most recent 2023-24 school year and slid even further behind in math and reading, exacerbating pandemic learning losses.

“At the end of 2021-22, we optimistically concluded that the worst was behind us and that recovery had begun,” wrote Karyn Lewis, a researcher at NWEA, one of the assessment companies.  “Unfortunately, data from the past two school years no longer support this conclusion. Growth has slowed to lag pre-pandemic rates, resulting in achievement gaps that continue to widen, and in some cases, now surpass what we had previously deemed as the low point.” 

The starkest example is eighth grade students, who were in fourth grade when the pandemic first erupted in March of 2020. They now need nine months of additional school to catch up, according to NWEA’s analysis, released in July 2024.  “This is a crisis moment with middle schoolers,” said Lewis. “Where are we going to find an additional year to make up for these kiddos before they leave the education system?” 

All three analyses were produced by for-profit companies that sell assessments to schools. Teachers or parents may be familiar with them by the names of their tests:  MAP, i-Ready and Star. Unlike annual state tests, these interim assessments are administered at least twice a year to millions of students around the nation to help track progress, or learning, during the year. These companies may have a business motive in sounding an alarm to sell more of their products, but the reports are produced by well-regarded education statisticians.

Curriculum Associates did not detect as much deterioration as NWEA, but did find widespread stagnation in 2023-24, according to a report released on August 19, 2024. Their researcher Kristen Huff described the numerical differences as tiny ones that have to do with the fact that these are different tests, taken by different students and use different methods for crunching the numbers. The main takeaway from all the reports, she said, is the same. “As a nation, we are still seeing the lasting impact of the disruption to schooling and learning,” said Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates. 

In short, children remain behind and haven’t recovered. That matters for these children’s future employment prospects and standard of living. Ultimately, a less productive labor force could hamper the U.S. economy, according to projections from economists and consulting firms. 

It’s important to emphasize that individual students haven’t regressed or don’t know less now than they used to. The average sixth grader knows more today in 2024 than he or she did in first grade in 2019. But the pace of learning, or rate of academic growth, has been rocky since 2020, with some students missing many months of instruction. Sixth graders in 2024, on average, know far less than sixth graders did back in 2019. 

Renaissance, a third company, found a mottled pattern of recovery, stagnation and deterioration depending upon the grade and the subject. (The company shared its preliminary mid-year results with me via email on Aug. 14, 2024.) Most concerning, it found that the math skills of older students in grades eight to 12 are progressing so slowly that they are even further behind than they were after the initial pandemic losses. These students were in grades four through eight when the pandemic first hit in March 2020.

On the bright side, the Renaissance analysis found that first grade students in 2023-24 had completely recovered and their performance matched what first graders used to be able to do before the pandemic. Elementary school students in grades two to six were making slow progress, and remained behind.

Curriculum Associates pointed to two unexpected bright spots in its assessment results. One is phonics. At the end of the 2023-24 school year, nearly as many kindergarteners were on grade level for phonics skills as kindergarteners in 2019. That’s four out of five kindergarteners. The company also found that schools where the majority of students are Black were showing relatively better catch-up progress. “It’s small, and disparities still exist, but it’s a sign of hope,” said Curriculum Associates’s Huff. 

Here are three charts and tables from the three different testing companies that provide different snapshots of where we are.

Months of additional school required to catch up to pre-pandemic achievement levels on NWEA’s MAP tests

Percentage of students below grade level by grade and year according to Curriculum Associates’s i-Ready tests

Catch-up progress as of the winter of 2023-24, according to Renaissance, maker of the Star assessments

Understanding why recovery is stagnating and sometimes worsening over the past year is difficult. These test score analyses don’t offer explanations, but researchers shared a range of theories. 

One is that once students have a lot of holes in their foundational skills, it’s really hard for them to learn new grade-level topics each year. 

 “I think this is a problem that’s growing and building on itself,” said NWEA’s Lewis. She cited the example of a sixth grader who is still struggling to read. “Does a sixth-grade teacher have the same skills and tools to teach reading that a second or third grade teacher does? I doubt that’s the case.” 

Curriculum Associates’s Huff speculated that the whole classroom changes when a high percentage of students are behind. A teacher may have been able to give more individual attention to a small group of students who are struggling, but it’s harder to attend to individual gaps when so many students have them. It’s also harder to keep up with the traditional pace of instruction when so many students are behind. 

One high school math teacher told me that she thinks learning failed to recover and continued to deteriorate because schools didn’t rush to fill the gaps right away. This teacher said that when in-person school resumed in her city in 2021, administrators discouraged her from reviewing old topics that students had missed and told her to move forward with grade-level material. 

“The word that was going around was ‘acceleration not remediation’,” the teacher said. “These kids just missed 18 months of school. Maybe you can do that in social studies. But math builds upon itself. If I miss sixth, seventh and eighth grade, how am I going to do quadratic equations? How am I going to factor? The worst thing they ever did was not provide that remediation as soon as they walked back in the door.” This educator quit her public school teaching job in 2022 and has since been tutoring students to help them catch up from pandemic learning losses.

Chronic absenteeism is another big factor. If you don’t show up to school, you’re not likely to catch up. More than one in four students in the 2022-23 school year were chronically absent, missing at least 10 percent of the school year. 

Deteriorating mental health is also a leading theory for school struggles. A study by researchers at the University of Southern California, released Aug. 15, 2024, documented widespread psychological distress among teenage girls and preteen boys since the pandemic. Preteen boys were likely to struggle with hyperactivity, inattentiveness and conduct, such as losing their temper and fighting. These mental health struggles correlated with absenteeism and low grades. 

It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the $190 billion that the federal government gave to schools for pandemic recovery didn’t work. (The deadline for signing contracts to spend whatever is left of that money is September 2024.) But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Most of the spending was targeted at reopening schools and upgrading heating, cooling and air ventilation systems. A much smaller amount went to academic recovery, such as tutoring or summer school. Earlier this summer two separate groups of academic researchers concluded that this money led to modest academic gains for students. The problem is that so much more is still needed.

This story about academic recovery was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post PROOF POINTS: Why are kids still struggling in school four years after the pandemic? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Educators around the country are scrambling to save jobs and programs created in the last few years as they face the end of the federal funds aimed at helping schools recover from the pandemic.

The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund gave districts nearly $200 billion. School systems leveraged these funds to pay for high-dosage tutoring, early literacy support, leadership development, enhanced counseling, expanded student exposure to career pathways and other endeavors. But when access to that money ends later this year, school administrators will face stark choices. To make a difference now, they will have to do even more with less resources as their students continue to struggle.

That means coming up with answers to some tough questions. Can educators free up essential resources from ineffective programs and nonstrategic professional development? Will they close buildings that have dwindling numbers of students? Should states put money into a coalition to expand evidence-based reforms? How should school leaders address funding inequities and invest in historically marginalized students?

School administrators cannot rely on existing strategies and instead should use the lessons learned from the last few years to boldly envision and invest in the future. The task will not be an easy one because the education field is obsessed with shiny new objects when we should be investing more in leaders and systems advancing the hard work that will drive scalable innovation.

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

The changes our students need require the type of courage, coalition building and focus demonstrated by participants in the University of Virginia’s Partnership for Leaders in Education (UVA-PLE).

Some examples:

• In Ector County, Texas, student achievement rose after the district reorganized to focus on talent development and rigorous academics. The district also dramatically increased internship and associate degree credit opportunities.
• In Oklahoma City, the district consolidated schools before the pandemic, and it has used the savings to invest in instruction, student support, leadership development and popular student programs that focus on technology. These purposeful actions led to the start of overdue academic gains, decreasing the number of underperforming schools from 30 to 10, increasing districtwide proficiency in 14 of 14 tested areas in grades 3 to 8, and ensuring every high school achieves growth on the ACT.
• In Englewood, Colorado, an intensive focus on instructional leadership and systems helped every school that had been placed on the state’s accountability watch list move to good standing, and one of those schools received the state’s highest rating.

As part of UVA-PLE’s 20th anniversary, we closely examined recent successful system change efforts to better understand what leaders need to do next. We found that our most successful partners are more responsive to the reality of schools, teachers and students and collectively display three attributes:

• They ignite action with a compelling vision and a willingness to disrupt the system. Leaders face up to harsh realities, drive focus and allocate resources to where change is possible.
• They build coalitions for sustained effort. Enduring change can’t be top down or bottom up but must include administrators, teachers, students and the larger community.
• They lead the learning and embrace evidence. Leadership teams consider opportunities and risk-taking with a data-driven approach so that they can understand and amplify what is working.

Today, our instructional supports are often not interconnected, our tutoring efforts are typically not complementing instruction and our students are not given enough rigorous learning experiences to expand their postsecondary opportunities.

Related: OPINION: Urban school districts must make dramatic changes to survive

States and funders can play a critical role in system change by drawing attention to and expanding effective efforts like those mentioned above. Today, too much attention is being paid to issues that may or may not lead to long-term transformation but are very unlikely to help current students. That must change. Emerging AI efforts, for example, show great promise but, like past technological innovations, will have negligible student impact unless leaders design them with greater attention to coherence and rollout.

We need to invest more in initiatives that promise to advance educational outcomes and opportunity now and lay a stronger foundation for future ingenuity. And no matter the challenge, leaders must be supported as they make tough choices and reimagine resource allocation.

Rather than fear the end of ESSER funds, we see it as a galvanizing moment. Now is a time to invest resources boldly in successful strategies and in leaders who are ready to insist that teams work together to achieve compelling results.

William Robinson is executive director of the University of Virginia Partnership for Leaders in Education (UVA-PLE).

This story about the end of ESSER funds was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

The post OPINION: As federal pandemic funds end, K-12 systems must look for bold changes appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LYNN, Mass. — In a middle school classroom in this Colonial-era city north of Boston, four 13- and 14-year-old boys were creating a poster with icons of their favorite apps. Ruler in hand, Enthonny Silva carefully delineated a box with the Netflix logo, while Guarionex Sanchez sketched the WhatsApp logo freehand.

None of the boys chose to be in school in the middle of July — they said their moms made them go. “She didn’t want me at home, sleeping all the time,” Guarionex said.

Yet all four said the program, which pairs project-based learning with enrichment in the arts and sports, is more fun than they expected.

Summer learning programs like this one, which serves low-income students who are typically two to three years behind in reading, have proliferated since the pandemic, buoyed by billions in federal recovery dollars doled out by the states over the past three years. Nationwide, more than 8 in 10 districts offered summer programs in 2023, many free of charge.

Yet summer programs still aren’t operating at a large enough scale to make a significant dent in the country’s Covid-related learning loss, researchers say, and the federal money is running out. Some programs are preparing to cut staff and services and reduce the number of students they serve next summer, while others, like the Dream MORE program for middle schoolers, in Lynn, are working to replace the recovery money with grants and donations.

Patrick Stanton, executive director of the Massachusetts Afterschool Partnership, a nonprofit that supports after-school and summer learning providers, said he believes families are in for a nasty shock come next summer. Programs are going to close, he warned, and waitlists will grow even longer.

“We’re sleepwalking into a crisis,” Stanton said.

But it’s not too late for schools to double down on summer learning. Districts have until the end of September to allocate the remaining $34.1 billion of the money Congress provided in pandemic recovery funds. At least some of that money could go to summer programs.

Schools can also try to tap into other federal funding streams to sustain summer programs, according to consulting firm EducationCounsel, which created a guide for districts.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free  weekly newsletter  to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox. 

The pandemic set back students from all income levels, with the average third through eighth grader losing the equivalent of half a year of learning in math and a quarter of a year of learning in reading between the spring of 2019 and 2022.

But low-income students saw steeper losses than wealthier ones, and the achievement gap between rich and poor districts grew.

Massachusetts schools consistently rank among the best in the country. But the state saw the biggest widening in the gap between districts serving low-income and high-income students, and among richer and poorer students within the same district, according to an analysis by The Harvard Center for Education Policy Research and Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project.

No district was harder hit than Lynn, where three-quarters of students are low-income, and where the share of English language learners rose 75 percent over the course of the pandemic, to 43 percent today. Students in this city of 100,000, whose now-shuttered shoe factories provided a gateway to the middle class for immigrants in the industrial age, lost the equivalent of two years of learning in math and 1 1⁄2 in reading, the analysis shows.

The $122 billion in pandemic-relief aid that Congress included for K-12 schools in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act was supposed to turn things around for districts like Lynn. The law required states to spend 5 percent of their share of the funds on “evidence-based interventions aimed specifically at addressing learning loss,” and set aside 1 percent of the money specifically for summer enrichment programs. It directed local education agencies, which received the bulk of the aid, to spend at least 20 percent of it on efforts to address learning loss.

Summer learning was the most popular strategy chosen by districts, with 3 out of 4 including it in their spending plans.

By February of this year, $8.1 billion in rescue plan dollars for schools had flowed to after-school and summer programs, along with another $2.1 billion of the aid sent to state, territorial, local and Tribal governments, according to estimates by the Afterschool Alliance. That influx of money allowed after-school and summer programs to serve 5 million new students between 2021 and 2024, the Alliance says.

Related: Students with disabilities often left out of popular ‘dual-language’ programs

Massachusetts has funneled close to $20 million in rescue plan dollars to after-school and summer programs through nonprofit intermediaries, with the majority of the money going to low-income districts like Lynn.

Even so, some low-income districts, including Lynn, have fallen further behind their wealthier peers, with learning losses continuing into the 2022-23 academic year, the Harvard and Stanford study found.

That doesn’t mean that summer learning programs aren’t making a difference. One recent study found that a program created by Bloomberg Philanthropies (which also commissioned the study) since the pandemic has helped students at public charter schools in eight cities recover 31 percent of Covid-related learning loss in math and 22 percent in reading.

But another study, which looked at the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts, found only modest gains in math and none in reading. To recover to pre-pandemic levels in math, the average district would need to send every student to a five-week summer school with two hours of math instruction for two to three years, the study found.

The problem, it appears, is that too many students are skipping out of  summer learning, said Miles Davison, a research scientist at NWEA, a testing organization and one of the authors of the study. An average of just 13 percent of students in the districts surveyed in the study enrolled in summer programs.

Davison and other experts believe that’s partly because families haven’t fully grasped how far behind their kids remain academically.

Related: Why schools are teaching word problems all wrong

The mention of “summer school” often elicits groans from students. The term conjures up images of struggling students toiling away in un-air-conditioned classrooms while their more fortunate classmates escape to summer camps and vacation homes.

Many of today’s “summer learning” programs are different, though, blending hands-on projects with fun activities. Unlike traditional summer school, students aren’t forced to enroll –  they’re enticed to by free meals and transportation, and by lessons like the ones Lynn offers in cooking, dance, drama, sports, and song and video production.

“If summer school and summer camp had a baby, you’d get summer learning,” said Aaron Philip Dworkin, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association.

At its best, summer learning is an opportunity not only to help kids catch up academically, but to get them re-engaged and re-connected to school, said Erik Peterson, senior vice president of policy of the Afterschool Alliance. And given the strong connection between student engagement and attendance, summer learning has the potential to bring down chronic absenteeism rates that have spiked since the pandemic, Peterson says.

Students in Lynn’s Dream MORE program, a partnership between the district and the nonprofit LEAP for Education, have shown gains in social emotional skills such as self-regulation and engagement, which are correlated with academic achievement.

The program lets students choose from a half dozen project-based learning experiences, including robotics, cyberbullying and “Life as a Young Teen,” the course in which the boys were making the poster about apps. Newcomer students are steered toward “Migration Stories,” while environmentalists might opt for “Eco-Warriors.”

In a recent class on “Culture and Cloth,” students watched a video about Navajo weaving, then sketched a design for a miniature weave they’ll create on a popsicle stick frame.

Rising sixth grader Savannah Nolan, who had already sketched a black spider on the back of her hand, practiced drawing on the nail of her friend, Sarahi Valerio. Savannah said her mom told her she could quit the program after the first day if she hated it, but she’s decided to stay.

“I’ve met so many friends,” she said. “I like that we do projects, and they let us use our phones” — something regular school forbids. She added, “We’re going to go on field trips if we behave.”

“And we’re good kids, so we’re going to,” chimed in rising sixth grader Sarahi, who is sketching a rainbow and a lollipop. (“It’s going to be Candyland,” she explained. “All pink.”)

Dream MORE, which opened virtually in 2020, benefitted from $25,000 in pandemic recovery dollars in 2022 and 2023. The program tapped into its reserves this year, and is ramping up fundraising for next year, said Linda Saris, executive director of LEAP. But competition for donations from individuals, foundations and corporations “will be intense,” Saris said.

A 2022 survey by the Afterschool Alliance found that programs that received recovery aid used the money to hire more staff, serve more students and expand program offerings.

That growth is now at risk, with more than half of superintendents in a separate survey reporting that they’ll be forced to cut spending on summer programs when the federal dollars run dry.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Summer school programs too short and not popular enough to reverse pandemic learning loss, researchers say

But there’s still time to postpone some of those cuts for at least a year. Though Congress gave schools only until the end of January 2025 to spend down their remaining recovery money, the Education Department is allowing districts to apply for an extension that would give them another 14 months to liquidate the funds.

If granted an extension, districts could continue to pay outside providers of summer programs through March 2026.

Still, researchers who have been tracking students’ post-pandemic academic recovery say districts and states need to be thinking longer term, and tackling learning loss from multiple angles — not solely through summer learning. If they don’t, the setbacks that students have suffered as a result of the pandemic could follow them into adulthood, said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at Harvard University who co-leads research on learning loss at the university’s Center for Education Policy Research.

“It’s pretty clear that the high-poverty districts in Massachusetts will not have caught up by the time the money runs out,” Kane said.

This story about summer learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Schools are embracing summer learning — just as the money dries up appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

MEDFORD, Mass. (AP) – Flerentin “Flex” Jean-Baptiste missed so much school he had to repeat his freshman year at Medford High outside Boston. At school, “you do the same thing every day,” said Jean-Baptiste, who was absent 30 days his first year. “That gets very frustrating.”

Then his principal did something nearly unheard of: She let students play organized sports during lunch — if they attended all their classes. In other words, she offered high schoolers recess.

“It gave me something to look forward to,” said Jean-Baptiste, 16. The following year, he cut his absences in half. Schoolwide, the share of students who were chronically absent declined from 35 percent in March 2023 to 23 percent in March 2024 — one of the steepest declines among Massachusetts high schools.

Years after Covid-19 upended American schooling, nearly every state is still struggling with attendance, according to data collected by The Associated Press and Stanford University economist Thomas Dee.

Roughly 1 in 4 students in the 2022-23 school year remained chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10 percent of the school year. That represents about 12 million children in the 42 states and Washington, D.C., where data is available.

Before the pandemic, only 15 percent of students missed that much school.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

Society may have largely moved on from Covid, but schools say they are still battling the effects of pandemic school closures. After as much as a year at home, school for many kids has felt overwhelming, boring or socially stressful. More than ever, kids and parents are deciding it’s OK to stay home, which makes catching up even harder.

In all but one state, Arkansas, absence rates remain higher than they were pre-pandemic. Still, the problem appears to have passed its peak; almost every state saw absenteeism improve at least slightly from 2021-22 to 2022-23.

Schools are working to identify students with slipping attendance, then providing help. They’re working to close communication gaps with parents, who often aren’t aware their child is missing so much school or why it’s problematic.

So far, the solutions that appear to be helping are simple — like postcards to parents that compare a child’s attendance with peers. But to make more progress, experts say, schools must get creative to address their students’ needs. 

Related: Proof Points: The chronic absenteeism puzzle

Across district and charter schools in Oakland, California, chronic absenteeism skyrocketed from 29 percent pre-pandemic to 53 percent in 2022-23. The district asked students what would convince them to come to class.

Money, the students replied, and a mentor.

A grant-funded program launched in spring 2023 paid 45 students $50 weekly for perfect attendance. Students also checked in daily with an assigned adult and completed weekly mental health assessments.

Paying students isn’t a permanent or sustainable fix, said Zaia Vera, the district’s head of social-emotional learning.

But many absent students lacked stable housing or were helping to support their families. “The money is the hook that got them in the door,” Vera said.

More than 60 percent improved their attendance after taking part, Vera said. The program is expected to continue, along with district-wide efforts aimed at creating a sense of belonging. Oakland’s African American Male Achievement project, for example, pairs Black students with Black teachers who offer support.

Kids who identify with their educators are more likely to attend school, said Michael Gottfried, a University of Pennsylvania professor. In one study led by Gottfried, California students felt: “It’s important for me to see someone who’s like me early on, first thing in the day,” Gottfried said.

A caring teacher made a difference for Golden Tachiquin, 18, who graduated from Oakland’s Skyline High School this spring. When she started 10th grade after a remote freshman year, she felt lost and anxious.  She realized only later these feelings caused the nausea and dizziness that kept her home sick. She was absent at least 25 days that year.

But she bonded with an Afro-Latina teacher who understood her culturally and made Tachiquin, a straight-A student, feel her poor attendance didn’t define her.

“I didn’t dread going to her class,” Tachiquin said.

Another teacher had the opposite effect. “She would say, ‘Wow, guess who decided to come today?’ ” Tachiquin recalled. “I started skipping her class even more.”

In Massachusetts, Medford High School requires administrators to greet and talk with students each morning, especially those with a history of missing school.

But the lunchtime gym sessions have been the biggest driver of improved attendance, Principal Marta Cabral said. High schoolers need freedom and an opportunity to move their bodies, she said. “They’re here for seven hours a day. They should have a little fun.”

Related: How one group is tackling chronic absenteeism among English learners by helping their parents

Chronically absent students are at higher risk of illiteracy and eventually dropping out. They also miss the meals, counseling and socialization provided at school.

Many of the reasons kids missed school early in the pandemic are still firmly in place: financial hardship, transportation problems, mild illness and mental health struggles.

In Alaska, 45 percent of students missed significant school last year. In Amy Lloyd’s high school English classes in Juneau, some families now treat attendance as optional. Last term, several students missed school for extended vacations.

“I don’t really know how to reset the expectation that was crushed when we sat in front of the computer for that year,” Lloyd said.

Emotional and behavioral problems also have kept kids home from school. University of Southern California research shared exclusively with AP found strong relationships between absenteeism and poor mental health.

For example, in the USC study, almost a quarter of chronically absent kids had high levels of emotional or behavioral problems, according to a parent questionnaire, compared with just 7 percent of kids with good attendance. Emotional symptoms among teen girls were especially linked with missing lots of school.

 “These different things that we’re all concerned about are all interconnected,” said Morgan Polikoff, a USC education professor and one of the lead researchers. 

Related: An unexpected way to fight chronic absenteeism

When chronic absence surged to around 50 percent in Fresno, California, officials realized they had to remedy pandemic-era mindsets about keeping kids home sick.

“Unless your student has a fever or threw up in the last 24 hours, you are coming to school. That’s what we want,” said Abigail Arii, director of student support services.

Often, said Noreida Perez, who oversees attendance, parents aren’t aware physical symptoms can point to mental health struggles – such as when a child doesn’t feel up to leaving their bedroom.

More than a dozen states now let students take mental health days as excused absences. But staying home can become a vicious cycle, said Hedy Chang, of Attendance Works, which works with schools on absenteeism.

“If you continue to stay home from school, you feel more disengaged,” she said. “You get farther behind.”

Changing the culture around sick days is only part of the problem.

At Fresno’s Fort Miller Middle School, where half the students were chronically absent, two reasons kept coming up: dirty laundry and no transportation. The school bought a washer and dryer for families’ use, along with a Chevy Suburban to pick up students who missed the school bus. Overall, Fresno’s chronic absenteeism improved to 35 percent in 2022-23.

Melinda Gonzalez, 14, missed the school bus about once a week and would call for rides in the Suburban.

“I don’t have a car; my parents couldn’t drive me to school,” Gonzalez said. “Getting that ride made a big difference.”

Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska, contributed to this report.

This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

The post Millions of kids are still skipping school. Could the answer be recess — and a little cash? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Urban school districts are in crisis. Student and teacher absenteeism, special education referrals, mental health complications and violence within and outside schools are all on the rise as student enrollment and state funding are in free fall. Morale is low for teachers, principals and district leaders. 

Compounding these challenges, federal pandemic relief education funding (known as ESSER) ends in September 2024. Recent in-depth case studies of Chicago and Baltimore City Public Schools and my own research, including candid conversations with current and former big-city superintendents, have convinced me of a stark reality: States and cities must either empower bold leaders to make dramatic changes or step in to make those changes themselves. 

It was impossible not to be moved by the courage the school leaders I spoke with displayed. Yet it was also obvious that the powers these district leaders possess are narrower than the challenges they face — and that they will need support from governors, state school chiefs, mayors and other leaders. 

One superintendent lamented the incessant political scrutiny and media criticism he’s encountered, noting, “You can’t make an error without it being spread all over social media.”

Meanwhile, principals are also under pressure; many are now serving not only as instructional leaders but also as food bank organizers and mental health crisis counselors. “This job is becoming unsustainable for people to be able to have a healthy life,” one superintendent said. 

Another superintendent emphasized the challenge of finding math teachers proficient enough to teach their subject, a problem exacerbated by state hiring regulations and union rules that prevent the assessment of candidates’ knowledge. “Most teachers are not even two grade levels above students in their math content knowledge,” she said.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

The best big-city district leaders know that their jobs now include resetting how public education operates. “What’s happening in schools is not just incompatible with what we want kids to do but also with the outside workforce,” a former superintendent said. “Everything outside of schools is getting more modern, hybrid, etc. Yet schools are still the same.”

These district leaders believe that learning must now be a 12-month enterprise, especially for the kids who fell behind during the pandemic.

Several leaders pointed to data showing that advances in teaching strategies are starting to work and noted that innovations in generative AI and team-based staffing could make teachers’ jobs easier, and partnerships with community services could help students with mental health challenges. 

But superintendents cannot make these changes alone: Their only route to survival is with support from their cities and states. 

When the fiscal cliff collides with enrollment declines, many states may be forced to put urban districts into receivership. Here are five ways state and city leaders can help urban superintendents and students now:

1. Provide political protection and regulatory relief for bold leaders.

States should provide financial relief, political cover and regulatory flexibility for districts that demonstrate solid plans and strong leadership. Superintendents must not be hamstrung by local rules preventing them from, for example, screening new teachers for math knowledge or insisting that teachers use evidence-based instructional materials. 

2. Update old policies to meet new challenges.

States can help by updating their assessment and accountability systems so they better measure and incentivize career-linked skills and credentials. As one leader said, “I do see a lot of potential” for more “paid apprenticeships, etc., but none of them fit in the state and federal accountability systems.”

3. Stay in the game.

State leaders cannot expect to intervene briefly and then return to serene detachment. Improving urban districts takes fortitude, vision and a willingness to persist through objections from entrenched interest groups. New York City and New Orleans demonstrated significant gains under state and city intervention, but status quo forces and flagging state support upended their progress. 

4. Help districts forge new alliances to adopt new strategies.

States can facilitate partnerships with employers, social services and higher education institutions by providing tax incentives and grants. They can encourage new, more sustainable staffing models, such as working in teams, and the use of AI to ease teacher workloads. They can bring in nonprofit transformation experts. 

5. Have a Plan B.

Not all urban school districts have bold leadership that can help them overcome the odds, even with strong state-level support. State leaders must be willing to make alternative provisions for students, such as authorizing the establishment of high-performing public charter schools, mandating tutoring and supporting community-led initiatives to address student needs.

Related: New superintendents need ‘a fighting chance for success’

Millions of young people are leaving high school without being ready for college. Generational poverty and its accompanying social ills are being hardwired into our cities. Inaction is not an option. State and city leaders must recognize that urban districts can and must be transformed — and it will not happen without their help. 

Governors, mayors, state legislators and state school chiefs must back courageous urban district leadership. And they must prepare to intervene when urban district leaders cannot overcome the overwhelming odds stacked against them. 

Robin J. Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research and policy center at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. 

This story about urban school districts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.  

The post OPINION: Urban school districts must make dramatic changes to survive appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Ever since the pandemic shut down schools in the spring of 2020, education researchers have pointed to tutoring as the most promising way to help kids catch up academically. Evidence from almost 100 studies was overwhelming for a particular kind of tutoring, called high-dosage tutoring, where students focus on either reading or math three to five times a week.  

But until recently, there has been little good evidence for the effectiveness of online tutoring, where students and tutors interact via video, text chat and whiteboards. The virtual version has boomed since the federal government handed schools nearly $190 billion of pandemic recovery aid and specifically encouraged them to spend it on tutoring. Now, some new U.S. studies could offer useful guidance to educators.

Online attendance is a struggle

In the spring of 2023, almost 1,000 Northern California elementary school children in grades 1 to 4 were randomly assigned to receive online reading tutoring during the school day. Students were supposed to get 20 to 30 sessions each, but only one of five students received that much. Eighty percent didn’t and they didn’t do much better than the 800 students in the comparison group who didn’t get tutoring, according to a draft paper by researchers from Teachers College, Columbia University, which was posted to the Annenberg Institute website at Brown University in April 2024. (The Hechinger Report is an independent news organization based at Teachers College, Columbia University.)

Researchers have previously found that it is important to schedule in-person tutoring sessions during the school day, when attendance is mandatory. The lesson here with online tutoring is that attendance can be rocky even during the school day. Often, students end up with a low dose of tutoring instead of the high dose that schools have paid for.

However, online tutoring can be effective when students participate regularly. In this Northern California study, reading achievement increased substantially, in line with in-person tutoring, for the roughly 200 students who got at least 20 sessions across 10 weeks.

The students who logged in regularly might have been more motivated students in the first place, the researchers warned, indicating that it could be hard to reproduce such large academic benefits for all. During the periods when children were supposed to receive tutoring, researchers observed that some children – often ones who were slightly higher achieving –  regularly logged on as scheduled while others didn’t. The difference in student behavior and what the students were doing instead wasn’t explained. Students also seemed to log in more frequently when certain staff members were overseeing the tutoring and less frequently with others. 

Small group tutoring doesn’t work as well online

The large math and reading gains that researchers documented in small groups of students with in-person tutors aren’t always translating to the virtual world. 

Another study of more than 2,000 elementary school children in Texas tested the difference between one-to-one and two-to-one online tutoring during the 2022-23 school year. These were young, low-income children, in kindergarten through 2nd grade, who were just learning to read. Children who were randomly assigned to get one-to-one tutoring four times a week posted small gains on one test, but not on another, compared to students in a comparison group who didn’t get tutoring. First graders assigned to one-to-one tutoring gained the equivalent of 30 additional days of school. By contrast, children who had been tutored in pairs were statistically no different in reading than the comparison group of untutored children. A draft paper about this study, led by researchers from Stanford University, was posted to the Annenberg website in May 2024. 

Another small study in Grand Forks, North Dakota confirmed the downside of larger groups with online tutoring. Researchers from Brown University directly compared the math progress of middle school students when they received one-to-one tutoring versus small groups of three students. The study was too small, only 180 students, to get statistically strong results, but the half that were randomly assigned to receive individual tutoring appeared to gain eight extra percentile points, compared to the students who were assigned to small group tutoring. It was possible that students in the small groups learned a third as much math, the researchers estimated, but these students might have learned much less. A draft of this paper was posted to the Annenberg website in June 2024. 

In surveys, tutors said it was hard to keep all three kids engaged online at once. Students were more frequently distracted and off-task, they said.  Shy students were less likely to speak up and participate.  With one student at a time, tutors said they could move at a faster pace and students “weren’t afraid to ask questions” or “afraid of being wrong.” (On the plus side, tutors said groups of three allowed them to organize group activities or encourage a student to help a peer.)

Behavior problems happen in person too. However, when I have observed in-person small group tutoring in schools, each student is often working independently with the tutor, almost like three simultaneous sessions of one-to-one help. In-person tutors can   encourage a student to keep practicing through a silent glance, a smile or hand signal even as they are explaining something to another student. Online, each child’s work and mistakes are publicly exposed on the screen to the whole group. Private asides aren’t as easy; some platforms allow the tutor to text a child privately in a chat window, but that takes time. Tutors have told me that many teens don’t like seeing their face on screen, but turning the camera off makes it harder for them to sense if a student is following along or confused.

Matt Kraft, one of the Brown researchers on the Grand Forks study, suggests that bigger changes need to be made to online tutoring lessons in order to expand from one-to-one to small group tutoring, and he notes that school staff are needed in the classroom to keep students on-task. 

School leaders have until March 2026 to spend the remainder of their $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds, but contracts with tutoring vendors must be signed by September 2024. Both options — in person and virtual — involve tradeoffs. New research evidence is showing that virtual tutoring can work well, especially when motivated students want the tutoring and log in regularly. But many of the students who are significantly behind grade level and in need of extra help may not be so motivated. Keeping the online tutoring small, ideally one-to-one, improves the chances that it will be effective. But that means serving many fewer students, leaving millions of children behind. It’s a tough choice. 

This story about online tutoring was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post PROOF POINTS: New studies of online tutoring highlight troubles with attendance and larger tutoring groups appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Reports about schools squandering their $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery money have been troubling.  Many districts spent that money on things that had nothing to do with academics, particularly building renovations. Less common, but more eye-popping were stories about new football fields, swimming pool passes, hotel rooms at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and even the purchase of an ice cream truck. 

So I was surprised that two independent academic analyses released in June 2024 found that some of the money actually trickled down to students and helped them catch up academically.  Though the two studies used different methods, they arrived at strikingly similar numbers for the average growth in math and reading scores during the 2022-23 school year that could be attributed to each dollar of federal aid. 

One of the research teams, which includes Harvard University economist Tom Kane and Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon, likened the gains to six days of learning in math and three days of learning in reading for every $1,000 in federal pandemic aid per student. Though that gain might seem small, high-poverty districts received an average of $7,700 per student, and those extra “days” of learning for low-income students added up. Still, these neediest children were projected to be one third of a grade level behind low-income students in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted education.

“Federal funding helped and it helped kids most in need,” wrote Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, on X in response to the two studies. Lake was not involved in either report, but has been closely tracking pandemic recovery. “And the spending was worth the gains,” Lake added. “But it will not be enough to do all that is needed.” 

The academic gains per aid dollar were close to what previous researchers had found for increases in school spending. In other words, federal pandemic aid for schools has been just as effective (or ineffective) as other infusions of money for schools. The Harvard-Stanford analysis calculated that the seemingly small academic gains per $1,000 could boost a student’s lifetime earnings by $1,238 – not a dramatic payoff, but not a public policy bust either. And that payoff doesn’t include other societal benefits from higher academic achievement, such as lower rates of arrests and teen motherhood. 

The most interesting nuggets from the two reports, however, were how the academic gains varied wildly across the nation. That’s not only because some schools used the money more effectively than others but also because some schools got much more aid per student.

The poorest districts in the nation, where 80 percent or more of the students live in families whose income is low enough to qualify for the federally funded school lunch program, demonstrated meaningful recovery because they received the most aid. About 6 percent of the 26 million public schoolchildren that the researchers studied are educated in districts this poor. These children had recovered almost half of their pandemic learning losses by the spring of 2023. The very poorest districts, representing 1 percent of the children, were potentially on track for an almost complete recovery in 2024 because they tended to receive the most aid per student. However, these students were far below grade level before the pandemic, so their recovery brings them back to a very low rung.

Some high-poverty school districts received much more aid per student than others. At the top end of the range, students in Detroit received about $26,000 each – $1.3 billion spread among fewer than 49,000 students. One in 10 high-poverty districts received more than $10,700 for each student. An equal number of high-poverty districts received less than $3,700 per student. These surprising differences for places with similar poverty levels occurred because pandemic aid was allocated according to the same byzantine rules that govern federal Title I funding to low-income schools. Those formulas give large minimum grants to small states, and more money to states that spend more per student. 

On the other end of the income spectrum are wealthier districts, where 30 percent or fewer students qualify for the lunch program, representing about a quarter of U.S. children. The Harvard-Stanford researchers expect these students to make an almost complete recovery. That’s not because of federal recovery funds; these districts received less than $1,000 per student, on average. Researchers explained that these students are on track to approach 2019 achievement levels because they didn’t suffer as much learning loss.  Wealthier families also had the means to hire tutors or time to help their children at home.

Middle-income districts, where between 30 percent and 80 percent of students are eligible for the lunch program, were caught in between. Roughly seven out of 10 children in this study fall into this category. Their learning losses were sometimes large, but their pandemic aid wasn’t. They tended to receive between $1,000 and $5,000 per student. Many of these students are still struggling to catch up.

In the second study, researchers Dan Goldhaber of the American Institutes for Research and Grace Falken of the University of Washington estimated that schools around the country, on average, would need an additional $13,000 per student for full recovery in reading and math.  That’s more than Congress appropriated.

There were signs that schools targeted interventions to their neediest students. In school districts that separately reported performance for low-income students, these students tended to post greater recovery per dollar of aid than wealthier students, the Goldhaber-Falken analysis shows.

Impact differed more by race, location and school spending. Districts with larger shares of white students tended to make greater achievement gains per dollar of federal aid than districts with larger shares of Black or Hispanic students. Small towns tended to produce more academic gains per dollar of aid than large cities. And school districts that spend less on education per pupil tended to see more academic gains per dollar of aid than high spenders. The latter makes sense: an extra dollar to a small budget makes a bigger difference than an extra dollar to a large budget. 

The most frustrating part of both reports is that we have no idea what schools did to help students catch up. Researchers weren’t able to connect the academic gains to tutoring, summer school or any of the other interventions that schools have been trying. Schools still have until September to decide how to spend their remaining pandemic recovery funds, and, unfortunately, these analyses provide zero guidance.

And maybe some of the non-academic things that schools spent money on weren’t so frivolous after all. A draft paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2024 calculated that school spending on basic infrastructure, such as air conditioning and heating systems, raised test scores. Spending on athletic facilities did not. 

Meanwhile, the final score on pandemic recovery for students is still to come. I’ll be looking out for it.

This story about federal funding for education was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post PROOF POINTS: Some of the $190 billion in pandemic money for schools actually paid off appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Rates of chronic absenteeism are at record-high levels. More than 1 in 4 students missed 10 percent or more of the 2021-22 school year. That means millions of students missed out on regular instruction, not to mention the social and emotional benefits of interacting with peers and trusted adults.

Moreover, two-thirds of the nation’s students attended a school where chronic absence rates reached at least 20 percent. Such levels disrupt entire school communities, including the students who are regularly attending.

The scope and scale of this absenteeism crisis necessitate the implementation of the next generation of student support.

Fortunately, a recent study suggests a promising path for getting students back in school and back on track to graduation. A group of nearly 50 middle and high schools saw reductions in chronic absenteeism and course failure rates after one year of harnessing the twin powers of data and relationships.

From the 2021-22 to 2022-23 school years, the schools’ chronic absenteeism rates dropped by 5.4 percentage points, and the share of students failing one or more courses went from 25.5 percent to 20.5 percent. In the crucial ninth grade, course failure rates declined by 9.2 percentage points.

These encouraging results come from the first cohort of rural and urban schools and communities partnering with the GRAD Partnership, a collective of nine organizations, to grow  the use of “student success systems” into a common practice.

Student success systems take an evidence-based approach to organizing school communities to better support the academic progress and well-being of all students.

They were developed with input from hundreds of educators and build on the successes of earlier student support efforts — like early warning systems and on-track initiatives — to meet students’ post-pandemic needs.

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

Importantly, student success systems offer schools a way to identify school, grade-level and classroom factors that impact attendance; they then deliver timely supports to meet individual students’ needs. They do this, in part, by explicitly valuing supportive relationships and responding to the insights that students and the adults who know them bring to the table.

Valuable relationships include not only those between students and teachers, and schools and families, but also those among peer groups and within the entire school community. Schools cannot address the attendance crisis without rebuilding and fostering these relationships.

When students feel a sense of connection to school they are more likely to show up.

For some students, this connection comes through extracurricular activities like athletics, robotics or band. For others, it may be a different connection to school.

Schools haven’t always focused on connections in a concrete way, partly because relationships can feel fuzzy and hard to track. We’re much better at tracking things like grades and attendance.

Still, schools in the GRAD Partnership cohort show that it can be done.

These schools established “student success teams” of teachers, counselors and others. The teams meet regularly to look at up-to-date student data and identify and address the root causes of absenteeism with insight and input from families and communities, as well as the students themselves.

The teams often use low-tech relationship-mapping tools to help identify students who are disconnected from activities or mentors. One school’s student success team used these tools to ensure that all students were connected to at least one activity — and even created new clubs for students with unique interests. Their method was one that any school could replicate —collaborating on a Google spreadsheet.

Another school identified students who would benefit from a new student mentoring program focused on building trusting relationships.

Related: PROOF POINTS: The chronic absenteeism puzzle

Some schools have used surveys of student well-being to gain insight on how students feel about school, themselves and life in general — and have then used the information to develop supports.

And in an example of building supportive community relationships, one of the GRAD Partnership schools worked with local community organizations to host a resource night event at which families were connected on the spot to local providers who could help them overcome obstacles to regular attendance — such as medical and food needs, transportation and housing issues and unemployment.

Turning the tide against our current absenteeism crisis does not have a one-and-done solution — it will involve ongoing collaborative efforts guided by data and grounded in relationships that take time to build.

Without these efforts, the consequences will be severe both for individual students and our country as a whole.

Robert Balfanz is a research professor at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, where he is the director of the Everyone Graduates Center.

This story about post-pandemic education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: There’s a promising path to get students back on track to graduation appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Schools spend billions of dollars a year on products and services, including everything from staplers and textbooks to teacher coaching and training. Does any of it help students learn more? Some educational materials end up mothballed in closets. Much software goes unused. Yet central-office bureaucrats frequently renew their contracts with outside vendors regardless of usage or efficacy.

One idea for smarter education spending is for schools to sign smarter contracts, where part of the payment is contingent upon whether students use the services and learn more. It’s called outcomes-based contracting and is a way of sharing risk between buyer (the school) and seller (the vendor). Outcomes-based contracting is most common in healthcare. For example, a health insurer might pay a pharmaceutical company more for a drug if it actually improves people’s health, and less if it doesn’t. 

Although the idea is relatively new in education, many schools tried a different version of it – evaluating and paying teachers based on how much their students’ test scores improved – in the 2010s. Teachers didn’t like it, and enthusiasm for these teacher accountability schemes waned. Then, in 2020, Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research announced that it was going to test the feasibility of paying tutoring companies by how much students’ test scores improved. 

The initiative was particularly timely in the wake of the pandemic.  The federal government would eventually give schools almost $190 billion to reopen and to help students who fell behind when schools were closed. Tutoring became a leading solution for academic recovery and schools contracted with outside companies to provide tutors. Many educators worried that billions could be wasted on low-quality tutors who didn’t help anyone. Could schools insist that tutoring companies make part of their payment contingent upon whether student achievement increased? 

The Harvard center recruited a handful of school districts who wanted to try an outcomes-based contract. The researchers and districts shared ideas on how to set performance targets. How much should they expect student achievement to grow from a few months of tutoring? How much of the contract should be guaranteed to the vendor for delivering tutors, and how much should be contingent on student performance? 

The first hurdle was whether tutoring companies would be willing to offer services without knowing exactly how much they would be paid. School districts sent out requests for proposals from online tutoring companies. Tutoring companies bid and the terms varied. One online tutoring company agreed that 40 percent of a $1.2 million contract with the Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida, would be contingent upon student performance. Another online tutoring company signed a contract with Ector County schools in the Odessa, Texas, region that specified that the company had to accept a penalty if kids’ scores declined.

In the middle of the pilot, the outcomes-based contracting initiative moved from the Harvard center to the Southern Education Foundation, another nonprofit, and I recently learned how the first group of contracts panned out from Jasmine Walker, a senior manager there. Walker had a first-hand view because until the fall of 2023, she was the director of mathematics in Florida’s Duval County schools, where she oversaw the outcomes-based contract on tutoring. 

Here are some lessons she learned: 

Planning is time-consuming

Drawing up an outcomes-based contract requires analyzing years of historical testing data, and documenting how much achievement has typically grown for the students who need tutoring. Then, educators have to decide – based on the research evidence for tutoring –  how much they could reasonably hope student achievement to grow after 12 weeks or more. 

Incomplete data was a common problem

The first school district in the pilot group launched its outcome-based contract in the fall of 2021. In the middle of the pilot, school leadership changed, layoffs hit, and the leaders of the tutoring initiative left the district.  With no one in the district’s central office left to track it, there was no data on whether tutoring helped the 1,000 students who received it. Half the students attended 70 percent of the tutoring sessions. Half didn’t. Test scores for almost two-thirds of the tutored students increased between the start and the end of the tutoring program. But these students also had regular math classes each day and they likely would have posted some achievement gains anyway. 

Delays in settling contracts led to fewer tutored students

Walker said two school districts weren’t able to start tutoring children until January 2023, instead of the fall of 2022 as originally planned, because it took so long to iron out contract details and obtain approvals inside the districts. Many schools didn’t want to wait and launched other interventions to help needy students sooner. Understandably, schools didn’t want to yank these students away from those other interventions midyear. 

That delay had big consequences in Duval County. Only 451 students received tutoring instead of a projected 1,200.  Fewer students forced Walker to recalculate Duval’s outcomes-based contract. Instead of a $1.2 million contract with $480,000 of it contingent on student outcomes, she downsized it to $464,533 with $162,363 contingent. The tutored students hit 53 percent of the district’s growth and proficiency goals, leading to a total payout of $393,220 to the tutoring company – far less than the company had originally anticipated. But the average per-student payout of $872 was in line with the original terms of between $600 and $1,000 per student. 

The bottom line is still uncertain

What we don’t know from any of these case studies is whether similar students who didn’t receive tutoring also made similar growth and proficiency gains. Maybe it’s all the other things that teachers were doing that made the difference. In Duval County, for example, proficiency rates in math rose from 28 percent of students to 46 percent of students. Walker believes that outcomes-based contracting for tutoring was “one lever” of many. 

It’s unclear if outcomes-based contracting is a way for schools to save money. This kind of intensive tutoring – three times a week or more during the school day – is new and the school districts didn’t have previous pre-pandemic tutoring contracts for comparison. But generally, if all the student goals are met, companies stand to earn more in an outcomes-based contract than they would have otherwise, Walker said.

“It’s not really about saving money,” said Walker.  “What we want is for students to achieve. I don’t care if I spent the whole contract amount if the students actually met the outcomes, because in the past, let’s face it, I was still paying and they were not achieving outcomes.”

The biggest change with outcomes-based contracting, Walker said, was the partnership with the provider. One contractor monitored student attendance during tutoring sessions, called her when attendance slipped and asked her to investigate. Students were given rewards for attending their tutoring sessions and the tutoring company even chipped in to pay for them. “Kids love Takis,” said Walker. 

Advice for schools

Walker has two pieces of advice for schools considering outcomes-based contracts. One, she says, is to make the contingency amount at least 40 percent of the contract. Smaller incentives may not motivate the vendor. For her second outcomes-based contract in Duval County, Walker boosted the contingency amount to half the contract. To earn it, the tutoring company needs the students it is tutoring to hit growth and proficiency goals. That tutoring took place during the current 2023-24 school year. Based on mid-year results, students exceeded expectations, but full-year results are not yet in. 

More importantly, Walker says the biggest lesson she learned was to include teachers, parents and students earlier in the contract negotiation process.  She says “buy in” from teachers is critical because classroom teachers are actually making sure the tutoring happens. Otherwise, an outcomes-based contract can feel like yet “another thing” that the central office is adding to a teacher’s workload. 

Walker also said she wished she had spent more time educating parents and students on the importance of attending school and their tutoring sessions. ”It’s important that everyone understands the mission,” said Walker. 

Innovation can be rocky, especially at the beginning. Now the Southern Education Foundation is working to expand its outcomes-based contracting initiative nationwide. A second group of four school districts launched outcomes-based contracts for tutoring this 2023-24 school year. Walker says that the rate cards and recordkeeping are improving from the first pilot round, which took place during the stress and chaos of the pandemic. 

The foundation is also seeking to expand the use of outcomes-based contracts beyond tutoring to education technology and software. Nine districts are slated to launch outcomes-based contracts for ed tech this fall.  Her next dream is to design outcomes-based contracts around curriculum and teacher training. I’ll be watching. 

This story about outcomes-based contracting was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post PROOF POINTS: We have tried paying teachers based on how much students learn. Now schools are expanding that idea to contractors and vendors appeared first on The Hechinger Report.