ESSER funds should be analyzed without regard to partisanship. The nation’s education system, especially in underresourced rural and urban areas, has long needed additional funding to update classrooms and school buildings, integrate technology into teaching and learning, and refresh curriculum and materials. But funding alone does not yield meaningful progress for students, as seen with past government-funded programs like Investing in Innovation (i3) or Race to the Top, 

At this critical moment, when children have experienced learning deficits that amounted to approximately a third of a school year’s worth of knowledge, evidence of impact is particularly important. This makes now the ideal time for nonprofits to invest in developing evidence that shows their product works, and for districts to make such impact nonnegotiable when deciding what to bring into their schools.

It may come as a surprise that evidence of impact and standards alignment is not a primary decision-making factor for many districts. A 2017 survey of over 500 school and district leaders found that only 11% required peer-reviewed research when making ed tech purchasing decisions. A 2022 teacher survey by Educators for Excellence found that just 43% of educators agreed that their current curricula was high quality and well aligned to learning standards.

One reason is that evidence is hard to come by. A 2020 report found that just 7% of ed tech companies used randomized controlled trials to understand the impact of their products. Another reason is inertia: Based on the decades-long use of non-evidence-based literacy curricula, it is clear that once a decision is made, it’s hard for districts to pivot. 

Yet as the sector faces budgetary constraints, evidence-informed decision-making, both before and after procurement, becomes even more crucial. The issue is timely in several ways. 

First, learning gaps compound when they go unaddressed. That means there is limited time to help students not only catch up to grade level, but accelerate beyond. For example, 1 in 6 children who are not reading proficiently in third grade do not graduate from high school on time, a rate four times greater than that for proficient readers. With limited in-classroom time available to help students catch up, evidence of impact should play a key role when districts decide what programs, models and interventions to buy. Many evidence-focused resources can help them guide decision-making, including EdResearch for Recovery and the National Student Support Accelerator. 

Second, with ESSER funding set to end in 2024, states and school districts have a limited amount of time to spend the $190 billion they have collectively been allocated. Besides risking student progress by spending funds on programs or services that do not lead to meaningful outcomes, districts face growing accountability from local constituents and taxpayers, who expect to see results when programs are bought with public funds. Districts should request evidence that a program is effective before making a procurement decision, and be prepared to explain that evidence to parents and others. If none is available, districts should find a different product.

Lastly, it’s only a matter of time before districts will need to decide what to keep and what to remove from their budgets. A recent EdNext analysis showed that 20% to 30% of ESSER funds have been used to purchase services, ranging from curriculum and supplies to one-time-projects and technology upgrades. Assessing the efficacy of each of these products will be critical in helping districts decide what to keep. For example, New Mexico’s Department of Education recently canceled its contract with a virtual tutoring provider because the program fell short of expectations. This shows the importance of measuring both short- and long-term impact. Districts should ensure that any contract they sign allows them to work with the provider to measure and understand student data, and make decisions based on the results. Doing so will provide a clear understanding of the financial and human resources needed to generate a specific outcome for students or teachers, ensuring that purchases are both effective and financially sustainable.

I’ve seen firsthand the benefits that a focus on evidence has for students and organizations. Nonprofits funded by Overdeck Family Foundation, such as Leading Educators, Saga Education, Springboard Collaborative, TalkingPoints and Zearn, have made evidence building and continuous improvement a priority over the past several years, conducting rigorous evaluations to ensure the product they offer districts improve student outcomes and are affordable. All these organizations have found that evidence of impact, while expensive to develop, has not only helped them expand, but has also increased demand. 

Due to the crisis nature of COVID, ESSER funding allocation favored speed over efficacy, limiting evidence requirements. But as rapid-relief dollars expire, the pressure on programs that lack evidence of student impact will grow. This may be just the impetus the education sector needs to prioritize evidence, improving the chances that all students receive the best possible education going forward, regardless of budgetary constraints.

So it was a huge help to the family, she said, that their school district used COVID relief funds to facilitate a tutoring program out of their church. There’s a “strong and united” community of people who share their Chin ethnic group identity in the small town, said Far, who left her home in Burma, now known as Myanmar, 16 years ago. And the church is a key shared space.

In the early days of the pandemic, the mother would bring her two older kids, who were in kindergarten and sixth grade at the time, to the Monmouth Chin Christian Church for in-person tutoring after their Zoom classes finished. Two paid instructors, both recent high school graduates and members of the local Chin community themselves, would coach them.

“That was really nice. I liked that,” Far said. She thinks the sessions prevented her kids from losing as much ground during the pandemic as they may have otherwise, and she appreciated the district having met the family where they were by coordinating lessons at their place of worship.

The program was but one example of the creative, no-holds-barred approach to tackling COVID learning loss deployed in Monmouth-Roseville schools.

Education experts worry that, nationwide, most academic recovery efforts have been too anemic to fully counter the damages wrought by the pandemic, but this tiny rural district appears to be beating the trend. Across the school system, students and families have gotten a boost from robust summer programming, new curriculums and no less than four different opportunities for tutoring.

Monmouth-Roseville students receiving tutoring outpaced their peers’ growth in literacy and math in 2022, according to standardized tests. And low-income students in the district made faster progress than comparable students statewide, an Illinois State Board of Education dashboard shows.

Roughly halfway between Chicago and Kansas City, and more than three hours by car from any major metropolitan area, the Monmouth-Roseville school system serves about 1,600 students, nearly a third of whom speak a language other than English at home. Many parents work grueling industrial jobs: In addition to Smithfield Foods — whose South Dakota facility turned deadly early in the pandemic — Wells Pet Food and Cloverleaf Cold Storage also have plants in the area.

The school system landed $5.3 million in federal stimulus money, its slice of the $190 billion distributed nationwide to help schools recover from the pandemic. While roughly half that sum has gone to improving the HVAC systems in two buildings, leaders have invested practically every leftover dollar into academic recovery, according to spending records obtained by The 74 from the district.

“It doesn’t make sense [to use relief money] to pave a parking lot if we have students struggling and behind grade level,” Superintendent Edward Fletcher said.

Tutoring, four ways

In addition to the effort at the Chin church, teachers and community members spearheaded two separate tutoring initiatives during the school day — the time window when researchers say programs have the best chance of reaching students who need them most. 

A Monmouth College education professor began bringing a cohort of pre-service teachers into the elementary school, allowing classes to break out into small-group instruction and “hone in on some of those [learning] deficits,” said Katy Morrison, principal of Harding Primary School.

And a teacher in the district launched a science of reading-based literacy effort that has grown into a partnership with the national tutoring program Future Forward. The initiative each year matches 100 pre-K and elementary schoolers who are behind in reading with individual tutors for intensive instruction.

“We wanted to target those kids … to see if we can get them to bump up,” said teacher Trisha Olendzki, who coordinates the program.

Outside the school day, the district has invested in tutoring at the nearby Jamieson Community Center, devoting $120,000 for three years’ worth of instruction for 20 high-needs primary school students.

Far’s daughter, who’s now in second grade, worked with tutors there this year. Thanks to the extra help, the young girl has mastered material more complex than her brother had at that age, Far said.

In the classroom, the district put more than half-a-million stimulus dollars into curriculum upgrades to make sure teachers have access to “top-notch” reading and math materials, said Amy Freitag, Monmouth-Roseville’s director of grants. Leaders devoted another $150,000 to train teachers in the new approaches.

Outside the school year, district leaders carved off about $73,000 in COVID funds to run four weeks of summer learning and enrichment for three consecutive years in 2022, 2023 and 2024. The figure budgets for 11 teacher salaries each summer and a modest stipend for supplies.

“We still have to teach grade-level curriculum, but we also have to bring kids up to speed,” Freitag said. “That’s where these supplemental programs come in.”

And through it all, district leaders have made sure to cater the interventions directly to the students and families most in need of support. Some 96% of students are low-income, 20% are English learners, 58% are white, 28% are Hispanic, 4% are Black and 4% are Asian.

Tin Tial, now a sophomore at Monmouth College, was one of the recent high school grads hired to spearhead the tutoring at the Chin church in spring of 2020. 

“The students definitely needed the help,” she said, explaining many parents had struggled with virtual learning due to language barriers

To advertise the program, the church sent out an email blast and handed out fliers to every family, she said, which she thinks was an effective approach because “basically all of us go to church.”

Parents in the community knew “they could rely on us,” Tin said, because she and the other tutor shared their culture and language. The young instructor distributed her phone number to families, who would text back and forth with her regularly.

The Chin community in Monmouth formed about a decade ago, she said, and now consists of roughly 50 families. Many, including Far’s, were drawn by jobs at the Smithfield plant, she said. The community immediately established the church and have used it as a gathering point ever since.

To Freitag, who brought the church-based program to life by greenlighting grant money to pay the tutors, the effort was one piece of a wider puzzle to help families recover from the pandemic. 

She’s proud that Monmouth-Roseville parents seeking to catch their kids up have numerous high-quality choices.

“The options are endless,” Freitag said.

Indiana students lost nearly six months of learning in math and over four months in reading as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new research from Harvard and Stanford universities.

The new Education Recovery Scorecard released last week offers the first comparable view of district-level learning loss that occurred in Indiana between 2019 and 2022.

A new interactive map shows that data for individual districts varies widely, with many districts’ achievement losses amounting to almost an entire year in math. New research also further confirms the pandemic widened disparities in achievement between high- and low-poverty schools.

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The results underscore continued concerns expressed by Hoosier lawmakers and state education officials about learning loss — especially among some of the state’s youngest students. Last year’s IREAD scores showed roughly one in five Hoosier third graders can’t read proficiently.

Other Spring 2022 tests showed that 30.2% of Hoosier students in grades 3-8 passed both the math and English sections of ILEARN. While the standardized test results were a slight increase compared to 2021, passing scores trailed 8 percentage points behind 2019′s pre-pandemic pass rates.

Key findings from the research

Researchers at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project used 2022 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), as well as Indiana’s publicly reported district proficiency rates on their Spring 2022 assessments.

Their analysis found that Indianapolis Public School District students experienced nearly eight months of math learning loss and over five months of reading learning loss.

Meanwhile, Carmel Clay School District students experienced about three months in math learning loss and four months in reading learning loss.

In Monroe County, Richland-Bean Blossom Community School Corporation students experienced nearly a full year in math learning loss and over seven months in reading learning loss. The small district serves approximately 2,700 students, according to Indiana’s Graduates Prepared to Succeed (GPS) dashboard.

The larger Monroe County Community School Corporation — which enrolls more than 10,000 kids — experienced just over four months of student learning loss in math and less than four months in reading.

In Lake County, River Forest School Corporation students experienced nearly eleven months in math learning loss and nearly six months in reading learning loss. Nearby Hobart School City District students fared slightly better, experiencing just under five months in math learning loss and four-and-a-half months in reading learning loss.

South Bend Community School Corporation students experienced some of the state’s worst learning loss — nearly an entire year in math and over a school year in reading. Students in the neighboring Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation lost just over three months of math learning and less than four months in reading.

Researchers emphasized that changes in achievement scores impact later life outcomes, including lifetime earnings, educational attainment incarceration and arrest rates.

The estimated loss in lifetime earnings per Hoosier student is $15,150 as a result of pandemic-related learning interruptions. When multiplied by the number of public school students enrolled in the state, the aggregate loss in lifetime earnings is more than $15.5 billion.

How Indiana compares

Harvard and Stanford research indicates that the median U.S. public school students in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half-year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading.

That means that in Spring 2022, students were about six months behind students in the same grade in Spring 2019.

Nationally, 8% of students were in districts that lost more than a year of learning in math, while 3% were in districts where math achievement actually rose.

Lawmakers send more help

Many states and districts — including those across Indiana — continue to use their portion of the $190 billion in federal COVID-19 aid to add tutoring and summer school and extended days. But researchers cautioned that many of those efforts are not yet large enough to fully address the learning loss that has occurred.

State lawmakers passed multiple new bills in the 2023 legislative session as part of an ongoing effort to reverse learning loss and increase academic proficiency.

That included House Bill 1638, which allows current high school students to retake classes they took online during the pandemic for a better grade. Students are eligible if the new course is the same subject matter, not virtual and at the same school.

A separate GOP-led effort will also require schools to use “science of reading” curricula approved by the Indiana Department of Education by fall of 2024.

The phonics-based literacy approach incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Education experts say it gives students the skills to “decode” any word they don’t recognize.

The state is also banning schools using the “three-cueing model,” which encourages students to make educated guesses at words using context clues. The model has been largely disproven by cognitive scientists but is still used by schools in Indiana and around the country.

The science of reading shift will be paid for from a $111 million fund created late last year by the state and the Lilly Endowment, which donated $60 million to K-12 science of reading efforts and $25 million to teacher preparation programs. The state has chipped in $26 million from the state’s federal COVID relief dollars.

Additionally, Indiana’s next biennial budget adds up to $20 million in each of the next two years for education department’s efforts on science of reading.

Individual school districts can also apply for grants from the department for literacy coaches, textbooks and lessons, teacher and administrator training or giving students extra reading help with tutoring or summer programs.

Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on Facebook and Twitter.

Thursday’s grants, totaling $6 million, add to a growing number of commitments from the outfit that was incubated and launched by the nonprofit America Achieves in the spring of 2022 to confront the educational impact of the pandemic. 

Last month the organization announced five “States Leading Recovery” grants, each in the amount of $1 million, providing funds to Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana and Ohio to bolster state education agencies’ efforts to rapidly develop and scale tutoring programs with the aim of making “tutoring a standard part of the American school day.” Previously in November, Accelerate also announced $10 million in grants to 31 groups to make tutoring more accessible and affordable. 

Accelerate’s mission extends beyond tutoring programming to funding more research around implementation and best practices. In a launch essay penned by Accelerate CEO Kevin Huffman and Executive Chair Janice Jackson and published exclusively by The 74 on April, 19, 2022, the duo wrote about Accelerate’s urgent focus on getting more tutoring to more students more quickly in more effective ways: “The nation’s public schools will spend billions of dollars over the next two school years on tutoring and personalized learning in the effort to catch students up. It is critical that these resources both help those who desperately need support today and build a base of knowledge that will change how schools operate moving forward. This can be accomplished only through a commitment to innovation, research and efficient sharing of lessons learned. We are hopeful that Accelerate can help fill this role.”

Research was also a component of Thursday’s announcement, with Accelerate noting that “every grantee will engage in research during the 2023-2024 school year, and ten grantees will participate in an Accelerate-funded research.” 

Below is Thursday’s full release on the 32 programs receiving either $150,000 “Innovation” grants or $250,000 “Promise” grants: 

Today’s grants come from Accelerate’s Call to Effective Action program, which supports innovation, research, and implementation in the tutoring field in order to help expand access to high-impact tutoring and raise student achievement. Grantees are working in 20 states across the country. 

“The evidence behind tutoring as an intervention is strong and the field is making tremendous progress, but we still need more providers with a proven track record that can also scale,” said Accelerate CEO Kevin Huffman. “Before the federal pandemic relief dollars dry up, we have an opportunity – and a responsibility – to identify these providers and ensure they are able to deliver cost-effective programs and present evidence that they get results for kids.”

A recent Tyton Partners survey finds that many districts intend to continue investing in tutoring after ESSER funding expires. However, teachers today are stretched thin as they continue to address pandemic-era learning gaps. High-impact tutoring must be made classroom-ready and easy to implement to fulfill its promise as an intervention. For these grants, Accelerate prioritized tutoring providers that are using technology to reduce barriers to individualized instruction; identifying untapped sources of potential tutors such as paraprofessionals or college students; aligning tutoring content with high-quality instructional materials; and/or designing programming to serve particular groups of students such as multi-language learners, students with disabilities, and those in rural settings.

All Call to Effective Action grantees have shown a commitment to developing and scaling research-backed tutoring models that improve outcomes for all students, especially those in historically underserved communities. Grantees have been selected for one of two grant tracks, Innovation Grants or Promise Grants. High-potential tutoring models that do not yet have preliminary or early-stage evidence of impact on student outcomes received Innovation Grants of up to $150,000 each to support program development, implementation, and data collection. Established tutoring models with evidence of scalability and positive student outcomes received Promise Grants of up to $250,000 each to support program implementation to further develop the respective model’s evidence base. 

Every grantee will engage in research during the 2023-2024 school year, and ten grantees will participate in an Accelerate-funded research cohort led by J-PAL North America, a regional office of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a part of this cohort, organizations will be matched with a researcher in the J-PAL network, attend trainings on key evaluation concepts, and receive support to run high-quality randomized evaluations. 

“Every student deserves the resources and opportunities to be successful in school,” said NYC Public Schools Chancellor David C. Banks. “We are so honored to receive this grant, which will greatly expand access to high impact tutoring for students at over 80 New York City public schools.” 

“Amplify Tutoring is honored to be a second year recipient of an Accelerate grant,” said Alanna Phelan, Vice President of Tutoring at Amplify. “This partnership will enable us to further build our evidence base as we continue to scale and innovate on our high-impact tutoring solutions that strengthen reading outcomes for students nationwide. We are excited to contribute to research about how effective tutoring can be transformative for young scholars.” 

“The Call to Effective Action grant will help Joyful Readers serve more than 1,000 Philadelphia elementary students through our high-impact AmeriCorps reading tutoring program in the 23-24 school year,” said David Weinstein, Founder & Executive Director of Joyful Readers. “We’re grateful to Accelerate for this grant and excited to partner with national experts in the field to improve our implementation, evaluation, and ultimately, our student outcomes. Being recognized by a national leader like Accelerate validates the hard work of our staff, AmeriCorps tutors, and school and district partners.” 

The grantees of the 2023 Call to Effective Action program are, in alphabetical order:

100 Black Men of Metro Baton Rouge

Air Education

Amplify

Bamboo Learning

Bay Area Tutoring Association

District of Columbia Public Schools

Elevate Birmingham and Leaders of Excellence

FEV Tutor

Heart Math Tutoring

Ignite! Reading

Illuminate Literacy

Intervene K-12

Joyful Readers

JUMP Math

KIPP Indy

Littera Education Inc

New York City Public Schools (The Fund for Public Schools)

Oko Labs

Once

OnYourMark Education

Peer Teach

READ USA, Inc.

Reading Futures

Reading Partners

Saga Education

Southeast Community Foundation

The Literacy Lab

Third Space Learning

Trustees of Boston University

Tutored by Teachers

Values to Action

Zearn

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to both Accelerate and The 74.

How do we know this? Recent research from our team at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University looked at learning patterns in 16 states to see how recovery efforts will affect students’ academic careers.

Our partnerships with state education departments provide the means to examine the experience of anonymous individual students as they move through public schools. Their scores on standardized state tests reveal what they know at the end of each school year and how that knowledge changes over time. This level of insight is both wide (covering all tested students in each state) and deep (the data illuminate students’ learning histories).

The COVID-19 pandemic has only magnified existing learning disparities. If an average student typically gains a year’s worth of knowledge in a year’s time, then those with greater-than-average learning progress more quickly. Conversely, those who do not learn as much as the average student gain less than what’s expected. Reviewing this data over multiple years yields a picture of the Pace of Learning (POL) for individual students.    

The differences in POL are the missing factor in policy decisions about post-COVID efforts.  

Our research assumes that the pre-pandemic pace of learning for individual students is the best that can be expected in the post-COVID years. Using longitudinal student data, we calculated each student’s historical POL and, based on those measures, projected outcomes under different learning loss scenarios. Here, we assume students have lost an average of 90 days of learning due to COVID-19, which other research has corroborated. We then considered the effects of additional time, measured in extra years of schooling.

The table below shows the percentage of students across the 16 states who would meet the benchmark of average knowledge in reading and math by the end of their senior year in high school.

Without additional learning time, fewer than two-thirds will attain that level in either subject. But more critically, even many years of additional instruction will yield only a small improvement. Even if schools offer an additional five years of education (assuming students would partake), only about 75% of students will hit that 12th-grade benchmark. One-quarter will remain undereducated.

Of course, these estimates are theoretical: No district in the country is capable of extending the years of schooling they offer by these amounts.

These findings reveal a lot about the future students face. Those who will reach the 12th-grade benchmark on time have POLs that are strong enough to keep them on track. They are not the ones to worry about. It is the students with smaller POLs who require the most attention and support. Currently, for every day of instruction, they gain less than a full day of learning. Even a full year of additional schooling may have little impact for them. Programs of shorter duration are even less likely to produce their desired aims.

Current remedies are insufficient to solve the learning gaps for low-POL students. High-dosage tutoring, for example, consists of four to six hours a week of extra learning time. For average learners, that leads to an increase of about eight percentile points on state achievement tests. But because students with low POLs receive less benefit from every hour or day of instruction offered, they will not progress to the same degree as the average student. At the end of a school year, the total number of hours cannot produce the sustained impacts needed for the low-POL population. Moreover, a large number of studies have found that the benefits from tutoring do not survive into the future for any students. Summer camps offer even less cause for optimism: They provide lower dosages, and for a shorter time.

Ultimately, the accounting does not add up.

Still, against these discouraging findings, there are promising options for addressing learning recovery. One is to allow students to progress at their own pace toward established benchmarks rather than holding everyone to a fixed timeline of learning. Shifting to a mastery-based approach, rather than maintaining the current system of organizing students by grade level, could achieve this. As long as students continue to progress and demonstrate growth, their schooling could continue. High achievers could reach the benchmarks faster than is usually allowed and move on to more advanced goals. Releasing students from the traditional school year would free up resources that could be devoted to helping lower-POL students.

Another option would be to change the pace of learning only for students with slower rates of progress. Children need higher-quality instruction to realize greater learning gains, and the evidence is clear that the best teachers get better results than average educators. Making sure each classroom has excellent instruction should be the ultimate goal.

Ways to find and deploy the most successful educators already exist. exist. By utilizing data from professional observations and student test scores, schools could identify the instructors who truly make a difference in their students’ learning and deploy those high-impact teachers in new ways. One approach would be to offer incentives — bonus pay, for example, or credit that could be put toward a sabbatical or other specialized training — to motivate higher-quality teachers to add students to their classes. Offering extra support to teachers who take on extra tasks, such as class aides or release from other duties, could also help. And placing lower-performing students in classes with a high-quality teacher and higher-performing peers can produce a jump in performance.

In places where the supply of high-need students outstrips the availability of high-impact teachers, an alternative could be to find the best educator in the state for a given subject, who would receive a substantial payment for recording an entire year’s worth of lessons. The videos and all supporting materials — lesson plans, worksheets, quizzes, etc. — would be posted online for other teachers to use.  

We call this approach the Instructional Commons. Building on the notion of Massive Open Online Courses, it offers significant benefits: peer-to-peer training, the opportunity for teachers to observe high-quality instruction in depth, a ready resource for their own lesson planning and a common standard for educators and administrators to employ for professional development. If adopted successfully, this approach can elevate the caliber of the existing teacher force at relatively modest cost and without political battles.

The country is at a pivotal moment in K-12 public education. It is time to decide whether we are willing to make the necessary changes to the current system for our students’ future. This will require deep alterations to the existing organization and practice of K-12 public education. The alternative: continued support of an institutional system that will almost certainly fail. 

Disclosure: Margaret (Macke) Raymond is a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution, which provides financial support to The 74.

Our struggles teaching the subject — whether evidenced by our middling performance against peer nations or the striking “math anxiety” reported even by young children — are a stumbling block preventing kids from reaching their goals, he has argued. And the obstacle has only grown since the generational setback of COVID-19, which triggered the greatest learning crisis in history. Scores on the latest iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress sank to levels last seen in the early 2000s.

That’s part of the reason why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced last fall that it would make math “the cornerstone of our K–12 education program strategy” over the next decade. Powered by $1.1 billion in new investments, the philanthropic giant will work with its partners to devise better curricular materials, improve teacher training and professional development, and fund research and development breakthroughs that hold the potential to transform the classroom experience. 

The agenda partially reflects Gates’s personal fascination with mathematics, which dates back to his years as a student. Before embarking on perhaps the most consequential career in the history of software, the future Microsoft founder blazed through Harvard’s legendarily rigorous Math 55 sequence, only focusing exclusively on computer science because he considered it unlikely that he would become one of the world’s greatest mathematicians. Distinguishing himself even in the rare air of tech founders, he co-authored a paper that settled the delicious-sounding question of “pancake sorting” for decades.

In a broader sense, the huge bet on math also builds on the Foundation’s existing work in the K–12 sphere. Gates has proven one of the most influential actors in American education over the first part of this century, fostering a movement toward small schools and promoting the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. Even when some efforts didn’t bear fruit — such as a failed seven-year campaign to strengthen teacher evaluation — Gates’s deep pockets and commitment to experimentation have helped make the weather in education policy for the last two decades.

Other priorities are expected to take a backseat through 2026, while math programming will grow from 40 percent of the organization’s education budget to 100 percent. It’s a commitment that dovetails with the public’s own concerns, Gates says: According to a poll released this week by the Foundation, large majorities of adults believe that math instruction needs an overhaul to become more relevant and engaging.

In a discussion with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken at the 2023 ASU+GSV summit — an educational technology conference that draws thousands of educators, investors, and entrepreneurs annually — Gates talked about America’s post-pandemic math deficits and what it will take to climb out of them. He also touched on the potential rewards to helping kids overcome their anxiety and fall in love with math.

“There is a gigantic upside in improving our public education system, both economically and in terms of equity,” Gates said. “But the country’s not falling apart as much as you might think.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: What is the extent of the math learning crisis that’s followed COVID? And can it be compared to the aftermath of other society-level emergencies, like the financial crisis of 2007?

Bill Gates: Even pre-pandemic, what the U.S. had was very disappointing. Math is a basic skill for many areas, and your attitude and success with regard to math is very predictive of whether you graduate high school or go on to higher education.

In our K–12 strategy, the Gates Foundation has shifted to math as our biggest priority by quite a bit. It’s a decision we made around the year before the pandemic started. It’s fair to say that the pandemic worsened math scores more than any other scores. Math is kind of a specialized skill in that your exposure can drop to near zero if you’re out of school, whereas your exposure to reading — and maybe, to some degree, writing — may not drop as dramatically. So it’s not that surprising, and we also see that math decay over the summer is dramatically higher than reading decay and writing decay.

You’ve got this huge loss, but there are some viewpoints that we’re starting to see some meaningful rebound. There was an article in the New York Times on that a few months ago. Then again, because our progress in math over the last 20 years has been so modest, the scores have hardly gone up at all. They’ve gone up a little bit. I’m only saying this to note, okay, we’re back where we were 10 years ago. But that’s partly a statement about the size of the loss, and it’s partly a statement about the very, very slow nature of the gains that we’ve had in math. The U.S. is doing quite poorly compared to other rich countries, even though the amount we spend on it is higher than any other, by substantial amounts.

The losses are tragic, though there are different ways of looking at them in terms of how much is in the inner city and inequitable. Some reports show learning loss as pretty much across-the-board; others show it much more in their inner city. If you abstract out how long your classroom was closed or what degree of online access you had, that is pretty predictive of lower performance.

And sadly, that does correlate with the lower income, minority-serving schools being worse off because their ability to do online learning, to get internet access, to get a device — almost every element that has to come together for good online learning — is less present in an inner-city public school than, to take the extreme, a suburban private school. And in the U.S., we had our schools closed longer than any other country. 

What are the big-picture costs of poor math learning on America’s competitiveness as both an economic and a geopolitical force?

The shortcomings of the U.S. education system are clear in terms of the inequity you end up with: the kind of jobs, salaries, mobility you’d like to see in society. Education is the great enabler of mobility, and we’re falling short on that. In fact, the U.S. economy has done relatively well because there are so many factors that enter into it, including the ability of the U.S. to draw very talented people from the entire world. But I think the predictions that this is going to hurt us in the long run are true, and we’d be further ahead if we were running our education system as well as we’d like to. 

This is why the Gates Foundation basically has two big things we do. The global work, which is centered on health and some things related to health, is the biggest thing for us because the vacuum of resources and thinking for malaria and childhood death was mind-blowing. In some of those areas, the Foundation is almost alone.

Research and philanthropy related to education should be a lot larger than it is, but we’re not alone there. There are a lot of players, and by some measures we’re one of the biggest players. There is a gigantic upside in improving our public education system, both economically and in terms of equity. But the country’s not falling apart as much as you might think. We make up for it by having universities that are the strongest in the world, and we do get some intellectual capacity because we’re an attractive place. Almost no other country in the world has this: When people say, “Hey, China’s strong,” they’re not saying that all great scholars in the world are flocking to China or India or Japan. Other than a few other English-speaking countries, the U.S. is truly unique in that respect.

It sounds like you’re saying that America isn’t so much falling behind the rest of the world as it is falling behind its own potential. That reminds me of research from Harvard’s Tom Kane, which found that we could lose almost a trillion dollars in future wages if eighth-grade math deficits aren’t significantly mitigated.

We’re going to be paying a price for a long time in areas that are hard to measure. We’ve seen this in terms of mental health problems, which obviously interact with young people’s persistence in education. The isolation that came out of the pandemic was a huge setback. How you map that onto economic figures — okay, there are a lot of assumptions in those numbers — but we’ve got a lot of making up to do. 

And most of the resources that help with that make-up are only going to be around for a couple of years. We will not have remedied our NAEP deficit — even to get back to where we were before the pandemic, which wasn’t an ideal situation — during the time that the ESSER money is still available. You also have shrinking school districts in many places, and scaling down while maintaining quality can be a very difficult thing. So U.S. education is a challenged space.

Switching gears a bit, you’ve previously compared the emergence of ChatGPT with the development of the microprocessor. I’m wondering how you contextualize it alongside other civilizational breakthroughs, like the Green Revolution or the emergence of vaccines.

The Holy Grail of computer science from the first time anybody did computation was how its abilities could compare with human capabilities. The so-called Turing Test was formulated before I was born, and throughout my history of using computers, there were things like Shakey the Robot or obscure things like ELIZA, which sort of tried to be a dialogue machine. Almost everybody who starts writing programs will do some random sentence generator where you have various grammatical patterns and sets of words and generate blather. It’s funny because sometimes it almost seems to make sense. 

We’ve been making progress in human sensory things, like matching visual recognition and speech recognition of humans. When I worked on AI stuff in the ‘70s and ‘80s, we weren’t making that much progress, but then there was the combination of scaling and new techniques — so-called machine learning techniques. It didn’t bother people that much that it could listen better than us or that, in a sense, it could see better than us, but there was no ability to read or write.

What we’ve got now is pretty amazing. It’s got huge limitations in terms of its accuracy and how you can train it. But given the scale of the industry and the promise — the amount of activity and the pace of innovation to take the current limitations and make it more effective — it’s pretty mind-blowing.

Its reading and writing capability has got everyone saying, “Wow.” When you sit at the computer creating models or taking a document or making a presentation, its ability to help you be more productive on those things is really phenomenal. And we’ve gone from no ability to do that to a pretty substantial ability just in this calendar year.

You mentioned your twin interests of public health and public education. Do you think the Gates Foundation’s successes in the former sphere — perhaps measured in the huge decline of malaria deaths in this century — are greater than those in the latter? And if so, why might that be?

The progress on public health, because it was so ignored, is really unbelievably dramatic. I’m not sure most people are aware of it, but if you gave a report card to humanity of what we’ve done well since the year 2000, at the top of that report card would be reducing the number of children who die under the age of five from over 10 million to under 5 million. Now, most of those deaths were in poor countries, and so the visibility to most Americans of that miracle is extremely low even though some American government aid was part of that; certainly, mass amounts of government science were part of that. And our Foundation played a fairly central role, if not a solo role. We have a lot of partners, including the U.S. government. 

There’s no equivalent in education. The equivalent would have been if the dropout rate from high schools was cut in half, that the dropout rate from college was cut in half, that U.S. math scores went up 30 percent, that we’re at the top of the lead tables. 

No such miracle took place.

With education, you do have trends that are tough. Very appropriately, the labor market gives capable women way more opportunities than it did in the past. But the education system cheated somewhat by having very talented women who weren’t given the opportunities they should have. So you have a little bit of adjustment in your teaching pool. And given where you have population growth, the average incomes of the kids going into the public school system is a bit lower, with more non-English-speaking households. That’s a little bit of a negative factor, but we’ve maintained and improved slightly. We’ve improved math scores slightly, racial equity slightly, high school graduation rates slightly.

It’s interesting. You can come to a conference like this or visit a really exemplary school and be reminded, “Wow, there are outliers!” There are microcosms where things are pretty fantastic, even at the school level. Certainly at the classroom level, you’ve always been able to go find the Stand and Deliver-style, unbelievable teacher. And whenever you find variance, you can say to yourself, “Hey, how come we can’t capture that best practice and get the average teacher to be close to that top teacher? What is it about training and understanding and incentives that makes that very difficult?”

We haven’t succeeded as much on that as we’d like. We have all this technology where, yes, you can look up YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles and sit there and do math questions for free on Khan Academy. And yet none of that — none of the seriousness about transferring best practices in terms of traditional teaching, and none of the new technology — has come in and really made that dramatic of a difference. Somebody could say, “Well, give up,” but not many people want to do that. We’re stubborn enough to believe that the improvements that have been made were worthwhile even though, compared on a per-dollar basis to what we’ve done in global health, it’s just not the same thing.

We save lives for $1,000 per life. And in education, [laughs] we haven’t done the equivalent of saving a life for $1,000. We feel like our work has been good, including helping the field find dead ends. In education, the R&D investment about “Why is that teacher good” or “Why should you insist on homework being done?” is way less than what it should be. And our foundation is one of many that’s tried to bring more understanding to what works and what doesn’t.

You probably saw the proposal to dramatically increase the reach of the Institute for Education Sciences and establish something like a “DARPA for education,” with the aim of accelerating the development of breakthrough technologies for learning. It seems like there might be a bigger role for the federal government to play in this field.

For all governments, all over the world; a lot of what we learn about education is pretty universal. But anyway, as a percentage of its size in the economy and the benefit of improving it, you could say there’s pretty dramatic underinvestment in K–12 research because the numbers are actually quite small. And if I said to you that the best math teacher was somebody 50 years ago, you could actually believe that. If somebody said that the best cancer doctor was some guy 50 years ago, you’d go, “What the hell are you talking about? That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

So the field has changed and improved, but pretty modestly. Helping those researchers — that’s still worth investing in. I was at a middle school this morning called Chula Vista where — together with a partner, High Tech High — we do some of our math instruction work. When you get into the classroom, it’s fascinating to see what works and what doesn’t. I have to say, when you see the teachers who are really engaged in trying to help other teachers do better, it often reminds you why this is an important field and that there really is promise.

When I think about the big K–12 reforms that were launched the last few decades by both Washington and institutions like the Gates Foundation, it seems like there’s now much less political will to pursue huge projects like those. I’m wondering if you are at all worried that really ambitious ventures — you could also include vaccine development and advocacy — are going to be a little harder to launch, harder to support.

Hmm. I’d say that, both under Bush and Obama, there was a real effort at the federal level to drive change in education. Of course, the federal level has the advantage that it affects all 50 states. It also has the disadvantage that you’re writing some rule about, “Please spend the money on this thing” in Washington, D.C., and then have many layers and diverse environments in the states.

For better or for worse, the amount of experimentation and top-down system reform that’s going to come from the federal government after the Obama period will be very modest. You can say that’s good or bad, but it’s just a fact that Democrats and Republicans in Congress are not thinking, “We’re going to change the way education is done.” The action has moved, you could say, to the state, district or classroom level, or these ed tech people, or the things that philanthropists fund. 

There isn’t one common theme. Charter schools continue to advance, although they’re a modest percentage of all students. Interestingly, there’s a huge shift such that charter schools are growing more in red states than blue states now. It’s complicated to characterize the results, but they’re largely good, and they are laboratories of learning. A lot of good ideas that should suffuse themselves into the broader public system come out of that charter experience.

I don’t think it’s that people are satisfied with our current education system. We did a survey about math recently where parents were very willing to say, “Hey, instruction should be different to drive the relevance and the engagement,” so there’s still open-mindedness that education can be better. Hopefully it’s not too politicized in that, if you show that a curriculum can get better results, people view that as helping kids and helping society.

I’m sure that if you get into some political topics in the curriculum, you may run into some sort of deadlock. But most educational things can stay away from those issues. The way we teach multiplication or algebra, we can do far better. That’s certainly a belief embedded in the priority we’re putting into math and math curriculum.

A lot of our readers might not be aware that you considered becoming an academic mathematician yourself. Are you still drawn to math? 

Yes! Math is fascinating. The way these new AI models work is extremely mathematical. If you learn all this new stuff, you’re drawing more on your math skills than your coding skills.

I initially did math, I was very good at math, and that helped me do coding. My framework for the world is very mathematical. And the boundaries of math have not moved all that much: We’ve proved the Four-Color Theorem, we’ve proved Fermat’s last theorem. It’s fun to track where we’re making progress and where we’re not. But I enjoy math, and thank goodness, because otherwise I couldn’t be as engaged in the AI stuff as I am.

Even when I’m doing my global health work, or when we’re looking at the trends in these education developments, math is important. I like symbolic, complex math, but just data science — which we’re hoping to get into the curriculum and make the curriculum more interesting — that stuff is amazing now. 

See previous 74 Interviews: Sal Khan on COVID’s math toll; economist Tom Kane on the challenge of reversing learning loss; and education researcher Martin West on last fall’s NAEP results. The full archive is here. 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

Roughly a year after most students in the District returned to full in-person instruction, the picture is quite different. The latest exam results show fewer D.C. students on track for college and career. Less than 15% of D.C. fourth graders from low-income households reached proficiency in reading on NAEP, and the gap between them and their peers nationwide nearly doubled compared with 2019.

The results highlight significant gaps between where D.C. students are today and the District’s goal of ensuring every child is prepared to achieve economic success, power and autonomy in their lives. In particular, the results confirm the need to remain focused on those students who are furthest from opportunity. D.C. leaders must urgently provide the resources, learning supports and enrichment opportunities that all students need to succeed, feel valued and pursue their personal aspirations.

Fortunately, there are some early indications of academic and social recovery in D.C.. EmpowerK12’s latest Unfinished Learning brief found that student growth in key grades and subjects had returned to pre-pandemic levels by spring 2022. Student well-being also significantly improved. But students furthest from opportunity experienced that growth more slowly. Those designated as at-risk in the District’s school funding formula, based largely on poverty, are an average of 15 to 18 instructional months behind, while students who are not classified as at-risk are about four to five months behind pre-pandemic national averages.

Those students who are “at-risk” for academic failure, as well as those with disabilities, and English learners, are disproportionately children of color who face pervasive, systemic racism. As the District works to recover from the short-term impacts of the pandemic, leaders must also look honestly at how, even before COVID, public schools in the nation’s capital came up short for too many students. Only by considering both the short-term, pandemic-related harms and the pre-existing policies that kept students from success can the District make progress on longstanding opportunity gaps. 

To that end, Education Forward DC, the organization I lead, recently launched an ongoing dialogue — our Better Than Before series. Since June, over 300 students, parents, educators, school leaders, policymakers and advocates have come together at three convenings for discussions led by education leaders, data experts and students themselves. A fourth and final gathering is planned for the end of April. Through these conversations, members of the District’s policy and advocacy communities are collaboratively working to understand the pandemic’s impacts on student success and how the District can build a school system that serves its students even better than it did before COVID-19.

During these discussions, we have heard directly from students and school leaders about the complex challenges they face. Students raised concerns about safety in their neighborhoods and in their schools, increased workloads, longer commutes, and teachers and peers experiencing emotional and behavioral challenges. School leaders pointed to the need to better support students’ non-academic needs, such as making them feel loved and supported in school, and addressing food and housing insecurity. In both cases, these factors were highlighted as major barriers to academic growth and social well-being. Future events in the series will include the release of a new snapshot of data examining students’ well-being after returning to in-person learning.

Taking on these numerous and complex challenges will require a clear understanding of where students are, in real time. In support of that, Education Forward DC partnered with EmpowerK12 to launch the D.C. Education Recovery dashboard. In addition to assessment data, the dashboard provides an at-a-glance look at key metrics to better understand how students are doing — including growth percentiles, chronic absenteeism and graduation rates. The dashboard also provides insights into the health of the District’s education system, including enrollment figures, per-student investment, and teacher and leader retention trends. The D.C. Education Recovery dashboard provides parents, educators and leaders with an accessible and comprehensible data set, regularly updated, to create a shared understanding of where D.C. as a city must collectively focus its resources, efforts, and energy across what will likely be an extended period of recovery.

It’s encouraging to see some metrics already improving. Since returning to school, students are learning again. However, there has been a troubling increase in chronic absenteeism, with 48% of students missing 10% or more days of school. Those considered at risk of academic failure have seen a 16-point increase in chronic absenteeism from before the pandemic. 

To address these persistent challenges, there is not a one-size fits all solution. The diverse needs of students require a wide range of solutions, expanded high-quality options so all students can find the best educational fit for their unique needs and accountability for the entire system when those needs are not met. 

Funding, too, is a crucial starting point. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed budget for next year keeps D.C. on a path of growing local investments in education. With leaner budget times likely ahead, D.C.’s leaders must maintain their commitment to making education a priority to increase equitable funding for all District students.

Before the pandemic, the District saw how the combination of strong investments, high-quality options and accountability can be powerful forces in raising student achievement and outcomes. Now, D.C., must demonstrate that it can deliver on the promise of a truly equitable and just recovery for all students.

Research shows summer matters for kids. Studies by Rand and the Annenberg Institute found that high-quality summer learning programs can result in meaningful academic benefits, particularly in math, and can help students better connect with their schools and peers. In the face of historic declines in math scores and declines in reading, children need this summertime boost now more than ever.

With ESSER funds available this summer and next before they expire, state and district education leaders should seize this opportunity to collect data on existing summer offerings, make improvements and build evidence-based programs in jurisdictions where they do not exist.

A research brief from the EdResearch for Recovery Project can provide a roadmap, highlighting eight design principles – including program duration, attendance, use of time and quality of instruction – that matter most in creating effective programs that deliver strong academic benefits for students. 

How well do these function in practice?

EdResearch for Recovery has spent the last year working with a network of school districts in Rhode Island and two in Tennessee to test whether and how evidence-based principles translate into action. This work and a deeper examination of initiatives in Woonsocket, Rhode Island show three promising steps districts can take to balance research recommendations with local needs and values. 

Establish values and goals for summer learning programs. Clear values can guide decisions about research-based recommendations, and by setting and measuring progress toward goals, leaders can see how those decisions are affecting desired outcomes. 

Woonsocket used three values — site-based leadership, qualified program personnel and student personalization — to guide its decisions as it evaluated evidence on what works in summer learning. It also established three goals: increase academic learning, improve connection and engagement with school, and strengthen social and emotional skills. 

Know and use the evidence. Research shows students benefit when summer programs hire certified teachers with content knowledge and grade-level experience and specialized support personnel. Woonsocket made it a priority to do this and used money from ESSER to provide extra pay and flexible schedules to summer staff. As a result, while many summer programs across the country struggled to hire adequate staff, Woonsocket had more than enough teachers applying to work. These initiatives also paid dividends in teacher satisfaction. In a survey at the end of the summer, 100% of educators agreed they had enjoyed teaching in the summer program.

Similarly, following the evidence, Woonsocket invested financial resources to keep teacher-student ratios low. Families saw the benefit of small classes, with 98% agreeing that the program helped children build positive relationships with peers and 95% agreeing that it helped build positive relationships with adults. Teachers also saw the benefits. One noted, “The ability to work with students in small groups without distractions had a powerful effect on student learning.”

When innovating, also evaluate. School districts can have unique circumstances that affect their use of evidence in program design. For example, limited ability for planning, personnel shortages and families’ demands for summer flexibility can conflict with calls for greater academic rigor or more weeks of programming. Districts must evaluate the outcomes of their decisions and quickly pivot if innovations are not working.

For example, district leaders in Woonsocket worried that asking students to commit to a program with at least 20 days of instruction, as evidence suggests is needed for academic gains, would discourage enrollment. Instead, they offered three two-week sessions. This flexible registration schedule led to high enrollment and low attrition across the three sessions. Ultimately, 40% of students enrolled in enough sessions to hit the 20-day benchmark.

Woonsocket also made innovations in program administration and curriculum development. Insteading of following evidence showing benefits in centralized decision making, Woonsocket opted to prioritize empowering site-based leaders and teachers. This led to some communication challenges across the district, specifically with families receiving conflicting or confusing information about how to register students for summer programming. But the autonomy and flexibility energized Woonsocket’s teachers. In a survey, one educator noted, “I had so much fun having more freedom.” At the same time, 95% of families agreed that their child was better prepared for the next school year after attending the summer program. 

No summer program will be perfect. But taking these three steps, drawn from real-world examples, can help district leaders navigate balancing research recommendations and local needs. And like Woonsocket, districts should commit to collecting and examining data to understand whether their programs are making a difference for their students.

In a sampling of 12 districts, fewer than 10% of students had received tutoring services during the fall semester of 2023. School officials in Indianapolis, for example, say a focus on quality made immediate scaling difficult and that they plan to enroll a higher number of students in tutoring programs moving forward. According to the Council of Chief State School Officers, at least sixteen states have established their own tutoring programs using a collective $470 million in federal COVID aid. Despite the challenge of reaching students, states like Connecticut, Illinois, and Oregon continue to announce new tutoring initiatives and investments.

In other funding news, the Education Department granted extensions to the amount of time that at least seven states and D.C. have to spend down the first tranche of COVID-19 school relief funds received during the height of the pandemic. Originally required to be spent by the end of January 2023, the states will now have until March 30, 2024 to finish drawing down a combined $6.6 million. The states include, in addition to D.C., Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin. A smaller handful of states additionally received extensions to spend down Governor’s Emergency Education Relief dollars. 

Looking beyond issues of COVID relief funding, below are updates from nine other states about how school systems are confronting the challenges posed by COVID-19 and its variants — and working to preserve student progress amid the pandemic:

MISSOURI — New Testing Data Show K-12 Student Performance Dropped Dramatically

Missouri is reporting that a veritable wave of schools in the state have seen student assessment scores plummet to levels that would typically, had a pandemic not taken place, see school systems lose accreditation. State education leaders say they will “not downgrade” any school districts based on the data, but are focused on driving resources and improvements to help schools and students recover academically. 

MARYLAND — Schools to Receive Added $600 Million as Blueprint Funds Flow to Districts

School districts across Maryland are preparing for double-digit increases in K-12 education spending as a historic statewide investment called the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future drives over $600 million in additional funding to budgets next school year alone. The Blueprint, a statewide law heralded as one of the most transformative education plans ever approved, aims to infuse nearly $4 billion in added school funding over its ten years of implementation, increase teachers’ salaries to a base of $60,000, and prop up universal preschool programs.

OREGON — Lawmakers Weigh Kotek Plan for More State Authority Over School Districts

Gov. Tina Kotek has proposed a bill that would create a sizable shift in oversight for public schools. Citing limited action the Oregon Department of Education is allowed to take when schools are out of compliance, SB 1045 would create a “monitoring process” that state education officials could use to ensure compliance from districts. Gov. Kotek’s education advisor, Melissa Goff, “portrayed the bill as a balance between providing support and tightening accountability, with an emphasis on the latter,” writes Rob Manning in coverage for OPB. The proposal has been met with criticism among some Oregon education leaders, organizations and other stakeholders, who claim the bill is solely focused on compliance without sufficient emphasis on support.

INDIANA — How Literacy and the ‘Science of Reading’ Get a Big Lift from Bus Drivers at One School

One Indianapolis school’s leveraging of school bus drivers to double as reading tutors is drawing attention to both the need for schools to be flexible and innovative amidst sharp staffing challenges, as well as the growing pressure educators at all levels feel to zero in on the “science of reading” to address long standing concerns in literacy achievement. Statewide, Indiana lawmakers are now considering stronger action to ensure early educators are teaching reading in an evidence-based way via Senate Bill 402, which, if passed, would ban the use of the critiqued instructional method called three-cueing and would require schools to adopt reading curriculum aligned to the science of reading. 

ALABAMA – Teachers Could Get $1,000 for Classroom Supplies

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey is proposing to boost funding for classroom supplies to $1,000 per teacher this year, delivering on a promise made by state superintendent Eric Mackey in 2018, when the average supplies stipend was just $422. State officials have raised the amount dedicated to teachers for supplies every year since then.

COLORADO — Denver’s Reforms Led to Huge Academic Growth, Study Finds. But Will They Last?

A new study is raising up over a decade of education reform and innovation in Denver Public Schools that, according to researchers at the University of Colorado Denver, has “led to some of the most significant learning gains ever measured.” Between 2008 and 2019, the district went from one of the ten lowest performing systems in Colorado to between the 60-65th percentile in math and ELA. Officials say the substantial gains in academic achievement were a testament of a suite of reforms — from flexible governing models and growth of charter schools to the closure of the lowest-performing schools and an innovative school ratings system. “The evidence we have is that students benefited from these reforms,” says Parker Baxter, the study’s lead author. 

PENNSYLVANIA — Gov. Shapiro Touts Tax Incentive for New Teachers as a Way to Ease Shortage

To bolster Pennsylvania’s teacher recruitment and retention efforts amid a slowdown in the issuance of teacher certifications, Gov. Josh Shapiro proposed a three-year tax incentive of up to $2,500 per year for newly certified teachers. The financial incentive is one of three solutions to remedy issues like teacher retention and recruitment, infrastructure, and student mental health brought on by the pandemic. In addition to the tax incentive, Gov. Shapiro has proposed an increased 2023-2024 education budget. “I believe in Pennsylvania every person, especially our children, should have the freedom to chart their own course and the opportunity to succeed,” Gov. Shapiro said. “It starts in our public schools.”

NORTH DAKOTA — Burgum Signs Bill Requiring K-12 Computer Science and Cybersecurity Instruction

Eight years after North Dakota’s Department of Public Instruction tasked a group with creating a vision for K-12 computer science and cybersecurity education, Gov. Doug Burgum has signed HB1398. The bill requires all K-12 schools in the state to teach computer science and cybersecurity courses. EduTech, a division of North Dakota Information Technology, will provide examples of cybersecurity and computer science lessons that will support schools in developing their own plans to integrate the subjects. “Our students have more access than ever to computers and technology devices in our schools. It’s crucial that our students also learn cyber safety skills,” Burgum said. “The ability to manage technology is also important in helping our North Dakota students to get good jobs.”

NEW MEXICO — In Rare Move, State Adds Weeks’ Worth of Extra K-12 Class Time

New Mexico Gov. Lujan Grisham signed into law last month a bill that would increase the number of required instructional days by 27 for elementary students and 10 for middle and high school students. The law will increase instructional time in roughly 75% of school districts, with the remaining having already met the new threshold. The move is being praised by educators and advocates focused on addressing learning loss stemming from the pandemic. “We needed time for small-group tutoring and targeted instruction, time for enrichment, time to plan, time for addressing social-emotional needs, time for our students to catch up after the pandemic,” said Mandi Torrez, a former New Mexico Teacher of the Year. “Time was where we needed to start.”

This update on pandemic recovery in education collects and shares news updates from the district, state, and national levels as all stakeholders continue to work on developing safe, innovative plans to resume schooling and address learning loss. It’s an offshoot of the Collaborative for Student Success’ QuickSheet newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

Of course, things didn’t work out as planned. United Teachers Los Angeles voted to boycott the extra days. Then, after negotiations, the district rescheduled them for winter and spring breaks, irking SEIU Local 99, the union representing school support workers. And whatever benefit the extra days might have brought was undone by the three-day walkout organized by both unions March 21 to 23.

One would think that, going forward, the district might try a different approach to adding instructional days, and that the teachers union might consider a different response.

But who are we kidding?

Last week, the L.A. school board approved the district calendar for the next three years. “The new instructional calendars address the need to mitigate learning loss by shortening the winter recess and extending options for summer programming,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. The plan is to shorten the three-week winter break to two weeks.

The seven-member school board unanimously approved the changes, and the press release includes positive comments from five of them. It also states that the district “undertook an extensive process of gathering input through surveys, focus groups and presentations from families, staff and labor partners.”

Unfortunately for Carvalho and the board, those surveys, focus groups and input from labor partners all indicated an overwhelming preference for a three-week winter break.

The district justified the change on the grounds that three weeks off “creates challenges for our neediest families that must be considered in decision-making.” Also, most large districts in other states have a two-week break, as do most districts in southern California.

Not one to overlook an opportunity for activism, the teachers union immediately filed an unfair labor practice charge, created a Twitter hashtag and ramped up an organizing drive against the change.

“School calendar changes are mandatory subjects of bargaining and UTLA leadership immediately sent a demand to bargain to the district,” reads a statement on the union website. “This calendar move exemplifies Carvalho’s refusal to bargain in good faith and his willful disdain of worker rights. By openly disregarding labor law and ignoring the voices of parents and staff, Carvalho continues to prove that he is not a leader. The school board’s approval demonstrates a failure to hold Carvalho accountable.”

A district representative told EdSource that calendar dates are “at the sole discretion of the superintendent and the Board of Education,” and that the district held two meetings to discuss the calendar with its unions — but UTLA sent a representative to only one.

Carvalho and the board seem to have learned nothing from their previous encounter on this issue and are blithely waving the red cape in front of the charging bull. The union will gore them again, but one wonders how often it can continue to place itself on the side of less school versus more.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Missouri is one of the newest states to see exponential growth in the adoption of this policy. In 2009, no district in the state had a four-day school week; but, as of the 2022-23 school year, about 25% are now on that schedule. Generally, most of the schools and districts adopting the policy are rural and west of the Mississippi River.

Against this growing trend, however, there is increasing evidence that, by and large, a four-day school week causes student achievement to suffer. To study the policy’s effects, we looked at a variety of outcomes in six states— Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma and South Dakota — five of which had the student achievement data we needed for the study. We compared achievement in English and math in grades 3 through 8 in schools that adopted the four-day school week against that of their five-day-a-week peers. We found that students in four-day school week districts fell behind a little every year. Though these changes were small, they accumulated. We estimate that after eight years, the damage to student achievement will about equal that caused, according to some estimates, by the pandemic. The potential long-term learning deficit in student achievement from the four-day school week is, our findings suggest, not trivial.

Why, then, is the policy so popular? For one thing, district leaders cannot see the harm. We found that school leaders, teachers and parents in districts with a four-day week reported that test scores were equal to, or even better than, results from before the policy was adopted. Our analysis confirmed that, by and large, exam results remained the same or went up year to year, even after the shorter week was adopted. But if school leaders were able to see the bigger picture of what was happening outside their district, they would realize that students in five-day-a-week schools were progressing faster. The four-day students were actually, comparatively, falling behind. In other words, their performance would likely have grown faster if their district had never adopted the four-day school week.

The ideas behind the policy are simple and appealing. A shorter week makes it easier to staff schools, a particularly challenging task for rural schools, due to their geographic isolation and lower salaries. Proponents of the four-day week also say a shorter workweek could get teachers to reconsider leaving their job, or bring retirees back into the classroom. It could reduce burnout and improve job satisfaction, and it could attract teachers from neighboring five-day school week districts, even if pay is lower in the four-day district. For districts facing budget shortfalls, the shorter week could save money on, for example, buses, school lunches, substitute teachers and hourly employees, and spend it to preserve staffing levels or hire specialized staff such as reading coaches.  

Indeed, in the 12 rural school districts we visited, school administrators, teachers, students and parents reported that the shorter week did indeed improve school morale. Teachers reported feeling less burned out and missing fewer instructional days due to illness or exhaustion. And while they spent time working on school tasks like grading and lesson planning over the weekend, they had more time to prepare for the coming week.

In a few schools, teachers also reported delaying retirement due to the shorter work week. Some even told us they were now willing to drive longer distances, and accept reduced wages, to work in a school that had adopted a four-day week. Students and parents were, by and large, also very satisfied with the shorter week. It allowed teachers, students and parents time to recover from the general stresses of school (e.g., early start times, homework, athletics) and spend more time at home with their families or engage in outside activities.

But even these perceived benefits have shortcomings. Take, for example, the recruiting advantage a four-day school week gives a district. This works only if neighboring districts still have five-day weeks, and even then, it is likely a short-term gain. If a district with lower pay but a four-day week successfully poaches teachers from a district nearby, what’s to stop those same districts from adopting the same policy and winning its teachers back? Indeed, the strongest predictor of a district adopting a four-day school week is proximity to a district that already has one. Teachers have a strong preference for working close to home, so when all surrounding districts operate on the same schedule, the four-day week ceases to be an attractive perk in making long-term employment decisions.

More generally, the four-day school week is being used to sidestep deeper underlying issues that are enduring, complicated and difficult to fix. For example, in our study, we found that the most common reason districts adopted a four-day week was to reduce costs on the expenses named above. Rural schools in particular have tighter budgets than urban ones because transportation costs more and rural areas tend to be poorer, leading to lower local school funding levels. Overhead costs are also higher because rural schools serve fewer children, and continued reductions in state funding makes these districts less able to sustain the costs of running a school. Lastly, while the four-day week might temporarily attract talent, it does not address the longer-term teacher shortages caused by factors such as high stress and relatively low pay that is not keeping up with inflation or other college-educated or advanced degree professions.

A better approach to improving outcomes for both students and teachers would be to address the root cause of the challenges schools and districts face, including insufficient and inequitable funding and teacher and student stress. Though the four-day school week can, at first, seem like an appealing solution to some of the problems that beset schools across the United States, in the long run the benefits may not outweigh the drawbacks—both in slowing learning, and by papering over the deeper issues schools and teachers face.

This essay represents the opinion of the authors and not necessarily those of the RAND or the University of New Mexico.

Funding for high-dosage tutoring, a strategy researchers say could be the most effective way to help students re-gain missed learning, appears likely to be left out of New York state’s 2024 budget.

In a response to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed $227 billion spending plan, lawmakers formally rejected a clause that would have devoted $250 million for school districts’ tutoring efforts. Though negotiations are ongoing over the finalized budget, which is due April 1, neither chamber endorsed the tutoring measure, indicating its chances of success may be slim.

The money will still reach schools as part of a total $24 billion distributed via Foundation Aid, a state funding formula that prioritizes high-needs districts. But school systems will have no obligation to spend the funds on tutoring.

The move was largely overshadowed by the legislature’s simultaneous rejection of Hochul’s plan to lift the cap on New York City charter schools, an action state legislators also delivered within their response to the governor’s budget. But while the charter debate has grabbed headlines, the scope of the tutoring decision may perhaps be farther-reaching, as experts warn COVID learning losses could hinder a generation of students if not addressed immediately.

Just days before the news from Albany, New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released a report that found New York’s fourth graders had lost twice as much ground in reading and math from 2019 to 2022 on national tests as the national average. New York’s fourth-grade math learning loss was estimated to equal 30 weeks of learning delays, or nearly an entire school year. DiNapoli urged school leaders to “act quickly” to remedy the stark declines.

Michael Duffy is the president of the GO Foundation, a New York-based organization that brings tutors into public school classrooms for one-on-one or small-group lessons. The legislature’s recent rejection of the governor’s tutoring proposal is a “missed opportunity,” he said.

“I think that those dollars would have been a really important way to help level the playing field,” Duffy said, explaining that the private market typically renders one-on-one tutoring accessible only to the well-off. 

Schools in New York and across the country are armed with billions of dollars in COVID relief money, much of which they are required to spend on learning recovery efforts such as tutoring. Yet across the country, just a fraction of students are actually accessing tutoring via their school district — in many large systems, under 10%. 

Empire State districts received a total of $14 billion and had spent approximately 40% of their stimulus allotment as of Jan. 31, according to the comptroller’s office. Funds are set to expire in September 2024.

In addition to federal money, New York is also boosting its state aid to schools by $2.7 billion above this year’s level. The total $24 billion in Foundation Aid will mark the first time in the 15-year history of the formula that it has been fully funded, a key Hochul campaign promise.

“Gov. Hochul’s Executive Budget makes transformative investments to make New York more affordable, more livable and safer, and she looks forward to working with the legislature on a final budget that meets the needs of all New Yorkers,” a governor’s spokesperson wrote in an email.

The governor’s office declined to comment on why the legislature blocked the tutoring proposal or whether the governor would propose any alternative learning acceleration policies in its place. 

State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie did not respond to requests for comment.

Robert Lowry, communications director for New York’s Council of School Superintendents, said his organization opposed the tutoring measure.

“It was not a well-thought-out proposal,” he said, explaining that many school leaders support tutoring and other academic recovery efforts, but fear they might face staffing challenges that could leave funds unspent if too narrowly earmarked. He also criticized the state’s emphasis on tutoring from grades 3-8 without serving younger or older students and the move to add requirements to aid originally intended to provide unrestricted funds.

Even without a state mandate, over twice as many superintendents reported that they are investing in extra academic help for their students, according to an annual survey carried out by the Council, Lowry said.

Tutoring “may be a promising model,” Lowry acknowledged. But the proposal from Hochul was too “rigidly constructed,” he said.

Ashara Baker, the National Parent Union’s New York state director, countered that setting aside money for tutoring is necessary in the face of what she says are inconsistent academic recovery efforts across districts.

“​​Families have lost trust in school leaders to be transparent about how much they’re willing to invest in getting our kids on track. This dedicated fund will ensure districts will all be accountable in investing in tutoring,” Baker said in an emailed statement.

Despite any efforts to recoup academic losses, observers still fear a continued dip in student learning. The New York Board of Regents recently announced it would be lowering the threshold for “proficiency” on state tests, citing last year’s lower scores as a “new normal.” In Schenectady, an extreme case, no eighth grader scored proficient on the math test last year.

Eliandra West runs Ebentive, a company that works with schools to help students with disabilities. Tutoring, the educator said, has been the tactic that’s triggered the best results for the struggling students she serves.

“One-on-one sessions have been the most instrumental [approach] in guiding students to find their voice in the learning process,” she said.

It’s what Duffy, at the GO Foundation, has also seen — and why he’s disappointed by lawmakers’ move to cut the statewide tutoring proposal.

“Every kid benefits from the attention of a tutor,” he said. “It is the future of education.”

Researchers, for their part, believe stagnancy among third graders is preferable to steep declines and proves learning loss interventions like tutoring and additional group instruction have been effective measures. Tennessee is cited as an example of a state taking the lead, with state leaders investing in high-quality instructional materials backed in the science of reading and aligned teacher training to narrow literacy gaps among students.

Elsewhere, data released from separate reports by Chalkbeat and the RAND Corporation, are highlighting elevated levels of turnover among teachers and school principals that are bucking hopes that staffing challenges would mitigate years after the worst of the pandemic. 

Teacher turnover was estimated at 10% nationally at the end of the 2022 school year, at least 4% higher than pre-pandemic — though the rate appears to spike when compared state-to-state, with turnover as high as 15% in places like South Carolina and Louisiana. The RAND data suggests that principal turnover is around 16% nationally, climbing nearly 13% percentage points through the pandemic. Staff turnover remains high despite nearly 90% of districts reporting they’ve implemented new policies and initiatives aimed at mitigating recruitment and retention woes.

Looking beyond literacy scores and teacher turnover, below is our latest roundup of updates from 10 states about how school systems are confronting the challenges posed by COVID-19 and its variants — and working to preserve student progress amid the pandemic:

WASHINGTON STATE — New Bill Would Reduce Classroom Learning By Four Hours a Week, Prioritizing Teacher Development

A bill proposed in Washington state is raising concerns for allocating up to four hours per week during the school day for teacher professional collaboration and development. Proponents say greater collaboration between teachers will allow for improved instruction and interventions for students, while critics say the measure would result in students only receiving 26 hours of instructional time per week instead of 30.

NORTH CAROLINA — Board of Education Aims to Increase Teacher Pay

The North Carolina Board of Education has submitted a teacher pay plan to the state legislature that would tie increases in base salaries to student performance and teacher evaluations. The proposal is receiving pushback from the state teachers union, which says increases should not be tied to student performance as measured by test scores. If approved by the legislature, a teacher’s starting annual salary in the state would be raised to $38,000.

ILLINOIS — Chicago’s Next Mayor Will Be a Former Educator

After Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s stunning defeat in the city’s recent mayoral election, two candidates with a history in education will proceed to a runoff election on April 4th. Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, a former public school teacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer, will face off against Paul Vallas, who served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 1995 to 2001.

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — DC School Aims to Make CTE More Attractive & Accessible

District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) are touting their efforts to expand Career and Technical Education programs and pathways for an increasing number of students. The district says six high schools now boast 30 industry certifications and 24 career pathways, from computer engineering and hospitality to culinary service and biomedical sciences. “There’s two things we know about our students,” said DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee. “Students who participate in extracurriculars and students who participate in our career and technical education programs are the most successful after graduation in DCPS, and, in fact, that is actually true nationally as you look at outcomes.”

MONTANA — Gov. Gianforte Signs K-12 School Funding Increases Into Law

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a measure into law that would provide “inflationary increases” to the state’s K-12 education budget, resulting in an additional $85 million in funding for schools in the Treasure State. The budget increases come as lawmakers in the state legislature consider a range of education bills focused on topics like teacher recruitment and retention, early childhood literacy, and the expansion of public charter schools.

KANSAS — As Governor Emphasizes Funding for Special Education, Lawmakers Focus on Private Schools

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly is continuing her push for a fully funded special education system as the state’s lawmakers convene their legislative session. Kelly’s proposed budget would see an increase in state special education funding of about $75 million a year over the next five years while the governor’s office also increases pressure on the federal government to shoulder a larger share of the funding that it currently is, at 13%. Lawmakers, however, appear most focused on a school voucher bill that would allow state funding to be used by families for attendance at private schools.

ILLINOIS — Governor Proposes $70 Million Program to Hire and Retain Teachers Amid Teacher Shortage

State lawmakers are considering a number of education funding increases and new programs put forth in Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s annual budget proposal, including a $250 million investment in early childhood education and a $70 million initiative meant to recruit and retain teachers as districts struggle with stubborn staffing shortages. Other bills being considered would expand student mental health resources, expand kindergarten across the state, and would bolster resources meant to support migrant youth.

MAINE — Blowing the Whistle on Maine’s Flagrant Fouls With Testing

The state’s failure to comply with federal assessment requirements has drawn firm admonition from the U.S. Department of Education. Maine’s Commissioner of Education, Pender Makin received a strongly worded letter from USED’s James Lane calling out the state for failing to meet federal requirements regarding annual testing for both the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years. As a consequence of violating federal requirements, USED is also warned that a quarter of Maine’s Title I, Part A funding — or roughly $117,422 — could be withheld. AssessmentHQ’s Dale Chu, commenting on the developments, says “There’s a symbolic power to the feds taking this action. While the dollar amount is miniscule, Uncle Sam can throw his weight around in other ways and it’s heartening to see him doing so on behalf of Maine’s students even if it is at the eleventh hour.”

NEBRASKA — Lawmaker Proposes Expanding NEST 529 Plans to K-12 Private Education

State Sen. Suzanne Geist is sponsoring a bill that would allow for the expanded use of the state’s education savings accounts towards private K-12 institutions. The proposal comes as a growing number of states explore ways to increase use of education dollars in private education, though Geist notes that the state’s 529 plans are primarily funded by private funding from families and would not impact public school funding in the state.

NEW JERSEY — State’s Plan to Hire Volunteers to Support K-12 Students Garners Lackluster Response

An initiative announced by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy in late 2022 is receiving criticism for failing to meet initial goals. The New Jersey Partnership for Student Success aims to recruit community members and organizations into supportive roles in schools, but has only received about 400 applicants despite the governor’s initial goal of over 5,000 for the 2023 school year. Critics say the state education leaders have been slow to recruit applicants and don’t have a clear pathway for those who are accepted.

This update on pandemic recovery in education collects and shares news updates from the district, state, and national levels as all stakeholders continue to work on developing safe, innovative plans to resume schooling and address learning loss. It’s an offshoot of the Collaborative for Student Success’ QuickSheet newsletter, which you can sign up for here. 

The terminology is important, because a strike for economic reasons during contract negotiations has certain procedural requirements and time-consuming steps, including mediation and fact-finding. The two unions’ contracts also have no-strike provisions, which is why both notified the district they were terminating their expired contracts.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho pledged to negotiate around the clock to avert the strike, then requested an injunction from the state labor relations board — all to no avail. The two unions had no inclination to call it off.

I believe the timing and length of the walkout is a calculated effort on the part of the unions not only to apply bargaining pressure to the district, but to undo Carvalho’s signature effort to address the effects of lengthy pandemic school closures: acceleration days.

In April 2022, Carvalho and the school board proposed adding four instructional days to the school calendar that would be optional for both students and teachers. Teachers who participated would receive additional pay, and students would receive additional instruction.

The teachers union filed an unfair labor practice complaint and called for a boycott of the first acceleration day, asserting that changes to the school calendar were a mandatory subject of collective bargaining.

After negotiations, the union agreed to the four days, to be held for two days each during winter and spring breaks. This didn’t please SEIU Local 99, which preferred the original plan of four Wednesdays spread throughout the school year.

The final two acceleration days are scheduled to be held April 3 and 4, but they are hardly acceleration days anymore, due to the unions’ decision to hold deceleration days this week.

Holding a strike on a Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday almost certainly guarantees that a large number of students (and school employees) won’t show up Friday, either. There go your four days of additional instruction.

The district could add make-up days to the calendar, but as UTLA reminded its members, “they will have to negotiate that with us as a union.”

The unions seem unperturbed by school closures of any sort. The teacher strike in 2019 closed schools for a week. Unions were largely responsible for in-person instruction being delayed until late August 2021. Both SEIU Local 99 and UTLA are ready for traditional, open-ended strikes unless significant raises and other demands are met.

As showing up at school has taken a backseat to other concerns among district employees, many students have followed suit. Enrollment has fallen dramatically, and chronic absenteeism continues to be a problem.

Teachers union President Cecily Myart-Cruz notoriously claimed, “There is no such thing as learning loss.” She’s wrong. The only thing kids learn from closed schools is that neither they, nor the schools, are important.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

On Thursday, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed House Bill 130, which will lift the state’s minimum amount of instructional time for elementary students by the equivalent of 27 days and for middle and high school students by the equivalent of 10 days. 

Total time in class differs from district to district, but the New Mexico Public Education Department specifies that younger children spend 5.5 hours per day in school, while older pupils spend six hours (lunch time is excluded from both figures). The existing minimums are being revised upward to 1,140 annual hours from the current figure of 990 hours for K–6 students and 1,080 for those enrolled in grades 7–12.

The new law will affect roughly three-quarters of New Mexico’s 89 school districts, the remainder of which already meet the new requirements. But some flexibility will be offered, both in terms of how districts use the time and what can be counted as “instructional” activity. In elementary schools, up to 60 hours of professional development, teacher collaboration, and parent-teacher interaction (whether in home visits or structured meetings) can be counted toward the state minimum. 

Democrat Mimi Stewart, New Mexico’s State Senate President Pro Tempore, said the deal was a difficult one to strike. Some teachers and parents grumbled about the prospect of a longer school day or year — districts will have the option of opting for either, or a mix of both — while the governor and some advocates had hoped for more stringent mandates on the amount of time kids spend in class. 

“It was really hard to get a bill together that was a compromise for everyone, and that’s really what HB 130 represents,” Stewart said.

Still, most local observers agreed that the need for action was dire. For years, New Mexico’s educational outcomes have ranked among the nation’s worst, dragged down by dishearteningly high rates of child poverty and teen pregnancy. That long history of underperformance was highlighted by recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed math and English scores for fourth and eighth graders slipping even further behind the national average.

But asking legislators to authorize more school time has proven a tall order. A review of major school districts conducted last year by Chalkbeat found that few had added days to their school years, even with the looming challenge of reversing pandemic-era learning loss. A 2022 proposal in Los Angeles schools to allow staff to work five extra days on a voluntary basis was met with a boycott from the influential United Teachers Los Angeles union. 

Mandi Torrez, the education reform director for advocacy group Think New Mexico, said she had surveyed the damage from COVID and concluded that recovery would need to move “from the classroom-out.”

“We needed time for small-group tutoring and targeted instruction, time for enrichment, time to plan, time for addressing social-emotional needs, time for our students to catch up after the pandemic,” said Torrez, a former New Mexico Teacher of the Year. “Time was where we needed to start.”

‘It would really level the playing field’

New Mexico is not dramatically different from most states in how it regulates students’ time in school. Each prescribes a set amount of time — whether a minimum of K–12 hours per school day, hours per school year, or days per school year — typically increasing for older students. Many settle on 180 days in a school year or an hourly equivalent that approaches that number.

Matthew Kraft, a Brown University economist who has studied the use of instructional time, said that the number of hours children spend in classrooms “varies tremendously” depending on geography. In a 2022 paper he co-authored with PhD student Sarah Novicoff, he found that differences between schools at the high and low ends of instructional time amounted to as much as 190 hours per year; that equates to roughly five extra weeks of instruction. Similar disparities persist in New Mexico, where 38 school districts (43 percent of all districts across the state) operate on four-day weeks. In testimony before the legislature in 2021, one expert said he regarded the task of restoring foregone instructional time to be a “lost cause” for many students.

“There are huge inequities in access for kids to instructional time based on what state they live in, what school district they live in, and what school they attend,” Kraft said.

That assessment largely matched Torrez’s experience as an educator. One of her favorite methods of reinforcing lessons, she said, was to offer after-school tutoring to small groups of students. But significant numbers, including some who might have benefitted the most from supplemental teaching, were unable to access it.

“I would always have some kids who couldn’t stay after school, for whatever reasons,” Torrez remembered. “If we can build in the time so we can do that tutoring during the school day, it would really level the playing field for all of our students.”

Along with several other proposals that emerged during the 2023 legislative session, HB 130 is effectively an outgrowth of an existing state initiative, K–5 Plus, which offers school districts additional funds to add up to 25 extra school days each year on a voluntary basis. A 2015 study of the program conducted by researchers at Utah State University found that participants saw marked gains in academic performance. 

But a damning report from the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee found that the vast majority of districts statewide declined the opportunity to take part in K–5 Plus, often citing the difficulty of staffing rural, low-enrollment campuses for additional school days. Teachers’ unions and school leaders also pushed back against a 2021 attempt to make participation in the program mandatory, arguing that it would impinge too much on summer vacations for school staff. Stewart, a former teacher, said that teachers had complained to her of the “miserable” experience of transitioning between in-person and online instruction. 

“It really is pandemic PTSD that I’m seeing now,” Stewart said. “Before the pandemic, teachers would tell me all the time, ‘We just want to teach more and be paid for it.’ Well, that’s what this bill does, but they still had a hard time accepting it.”

‘This is good policy’

Throughout the session, Stewart acted as a co-sponsor of both HB 130 and HB 194, an alternate measure that would have imposed the same minimum time requirements but not allowed districts to count non-classroom activities — such as lesson planning and teacher collaboration — as instructional time. That carve-out only applies to 60 hours for K–6 teachers, many of whom are now receiving special literacy training, and only 30 hours for teachers in grades 7–12. 

The second bill was favored by Gov. Lujan Grisham, she said, but both local education officials and teachers themselves pushed for greater flexibility. In the end, she said, it was “a real effort to get the education community onboard with anything that increased [the length of] the school year.”

“We made the change to the hours to answer the local control cries that we get inundated with every session: ‘We want to decide ourselves! Just give us the money!’” Stewart said. “There’s always this tension between local control and state control, and HB 130 was designed to bridge that divide.” 

Legislators in other states are likely familiar with the political roadblocks. Even with extra funding attached to pay school employees for their additional labors, many teachers around the country reject the notion of working longer hours after the learning challenges they’ve had to contend over with the past three years. After a pandemic-era dip in turnover, mounting frustration and burnout are being felt in higher teacher quit rates.

Consequently, even with documented learning loss posing a huge threat to the educational attainment of this generation of students, states have been slow to embrace increased instructional time as a solution. One exception is Kansas, where lawmakers are currently weighing a proposal to lift the minimum number of annual school days to 195 — an enormous increase — but the measure’s chances for passage are unclear, and few legislatures are following their lead.

Michael Petrilli, head of the reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institution, lamented the reluctance to expand hours spent in class, calling the approach a “no-brainer” tool to lift student performance.

“To be sure, some advocates chafe at the idea of ‘seat time,’” Petrilli observed. “But academic learning isn’t that much different from sports or music or anything else in life: If we want to get better at something, more time on task is an essential part of the equation.”

Kraft said that most research of the effects of extended learning time showed that, when used appropriately, it reliably lifted outcomes for kids. Still, he added, teachers shouldn’t simply be corralled into working longer hours after the pandemic’s ordeal. Instead, districts should be thoughtful about the ways in which they lengthened the school day and year — perhaps by recruiting more tutors so that teachers themselves could have more time to work together and improve pedagogy. 

“This is good policy,” Kraft said. “It would be even better policy if we also think critically about how that’s going to affect the teacher workforce and how we can support schools to…make sure they use that time well.”

Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced a large-scale effort Wednesday to address learning loss among Virginia students due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The plan includes launching a grant program for qualifying families to cover extra educational expenses and a web tool to provide comprehensive data on student learning for parents and teachers.

Youngkin’s announcement follows the release last year of state and national data revealing wide achievement gaps and proficiency declines among Virginia students during the pandemic.

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“Virginia’s students and children across the country experienced catastrophic learning loss throughout the COVID-19 pandemic from the loss of in-person instruction and in-school support services,” said Youngkin in a statement. “These targeted resources for parents will ensure that many children in Virginia have access to the tutoring, summer enrichment programs and other specialized services they need in order to reach their full potential and combat the severe learning losses.”

Youngkin is slated to take part in a CNN Town Hall on education Thursday night.

New grant program for parents

Although the pandemic impacted all Virginia students, not all families will be eligible to receive a grant from the new Learning Recovery Grants program.

According to the governor’s office, qualifying students whose family income does not exceed 300% of the federal poverty level will receive a $3,000 K-12 Learning Recovery Grant. All other qualifying students will receive a $1,500 grant. The office did not provide details on when the grant application process would begin.

Secretary of Education Aimee Rogstad Guidera said last October that National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, results showed that Virginia is failing students, including fourth graders, who showed the largest decline nationwide in math and reading scores between 2017 and 2022.

“We are on the cusp of losing an entire generation of students,” Guidera said in a statement. “Parents deserve actionable information and financial support to determine and access the tools for their child to combat their learning losses.”

Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, proposed a similar program through a budget amendment this session to provide matching grants to school divisions.

Under the request, Virginia would appropriate $268 million in fiscal year 2024 from the general fund for the Virginia Accelerating Literacy and Learning Corps, which would provide matching grants to school divisions to “implement or strengthen high dosage, small group tutoring supports for students struggling in English and mathematics.”

“If we’re actually trying to bring up NAEP scores, if we’re actually trying to bring up our literacy rates, if we’re actually trying to bring up our learning loss across the commonwealth, doing it through this model is more of an effective use of resources and time whereas the governor’s plan is essentially vouchers for tutoring,” VanValkenburg said.

The General Assembly is expected to return to Richmond this spring to finalize changes to the biennial budget.

Student learning data platform

On Wednesday, the governor also announced the unveiling of Virginia’s Visualization and Analytics Solution, an online platform intended to give parents and teachers data to help them address individual student learning loss.

The governor’s office said nearly half of Virginia school divisions already have access to the online platform. The platform will be available to the remaining school divisions in two months.

The Virginia Department of Education is also training over 800 school division staff members to use the information to “meet student needs, target remediation efforts, and strategically use division resources,” and William & Mary has partnered with several school divisions to provide additional training.

Legislation that cleared the General Assembly this session also aims to provide comprehensive data to parents and teachers by requiring the Virginia Board of Education to create and maintain the Virginia Parent Data Portal, which will contain individualized student assessment data on all state-supported evaluations, by July 1, 2025.

The legislation would also require the board and Department of Education to provide guidance and technical assistance to school divisions on using the data.

Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield, Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, and former state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, carried the bills now headed to the governor’s desk.

“I’m all in favor of focusing on education,” Petersen told the Mercury Thursday, adding that the pandemic shutdown and the lack of in-person learning have impacted student learning.

Providing parents with in-depth data on students “was the idea,” Petersen said. “And yeah, I think that’s part of the solution. So if the governor’s supporting that, then more power to him.”

Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on Facebook and Twitter.

The data underscore the resiliency of pandemic-era learning loss and the depth of the challenge schools face in recovering academic losses. 

Looking beyond student proficiency, below is our latest roundup of updates from 12 states about how school systems are confronting the challenges posed by COVID-19 and its variants — and working to preserve student progress amid the pandemic:

IOWA — Schools Prepare to Tighten Budgets as Pandemic Aid Ends

Some school districts in Iowa are proactively strategizing how to keep programs such as full-day pre-school fully funded once historic amounts of federal pandemic funds expire in 2024. Karla Hogan, Cedar Rapids schools’ executive director of business services, said her district is simultaneously reserving some of its state funds from other areas while pushing on lawmakers to approve revised funding at the state level to avoid program cuts and layoffs.

OHIO — Governor Pushes For Science of Reading As Only Approach:

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is being described as taking the nation’s reckoning on literacy instruction and the “science of reading” to new heights, proposing legislation that bars literacy approaches many say have lost credibility. Under the proposal, materials or lessons using approaches without a strong evidence base, including the use of “three-cueing”, would be banned, which could include widely used programs like Balanced Literacy, Whole Language, and Reading Recovery. “There is a great deal of research about how we learn to read,” he said. “And today, we understand the great value and importance of phonics. Not all literacy curriculums are created equal, and sadly, many Ohio students do not have access to the most effective reading curriculum.”

ILLINOIS — Gov. J.B. Pritzker Renews Pre-K Expansion Push with 2024 Budget Proposing $250 Million Increase

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker proposed increasing the state’s education budget by nearly 11% over the last budget, a notable push as he marks the beginning of his second term in office. While he’ll need approval from state lawmakers, Pritzker said the increased investment would pay dividends in “positive social and economic impacts” The proposal includes significant expansions in Pre-K programs across the state, centering on a four-year plan to create 20,000 Pre-K seats in classrooms by 2027. 

TEXAS — Dallas ISD Changed Some School Schedules to Combat Learning Loss. Did It Work?:

Two years after Dallas Independent School District offered two new academic calendars for schools to opt into a bid to maximize learning recovery, the district is digging into data to learn if the extended calendars made a difference for students. Dallas ISD Chief Academic Officer Shannon Trejo previewed data at a recent Board of Trustees meeting that indicates that offering three potential calendars – a standard calendar, an intersession calendar, and a school-day redesign calendar – may have helped some students recover and “retain” learning, though the gains were smaller than what trustees had expected. 

CALIFORNIA — 1.3 Million Los Angeles Students Could Soon Access Free Teletherapy

A new partnership between Los Angeles county schools and telehealth provider Hazel Health could provide short-term mental health services to the region’s 1.3 million students amid a statewide focus on addressing spiking rates of suicide, depression, and other mental health concerns. After up to six weeks of services, Hazel Health says it is positioned to help connect students and families requiring long-term treatment to community-based providers. 

UTAH — Lawmakers Push to End School Grading

A bill being considered by the Utah legislature would end the state’s use of letter grades to evaluate schools and has cleared the House Education Committee with over 24 co-sponsors. The push is being spearheaded by State Rep. Douglas Welton, a former public school teacher, with support from the Utah State Board, the Utah Education Association, and the School Boards Association. If passed, the state would still identify schools performing in the bottom 20% for interventions, but would no longer assign schools grades A-F. A second education-focused bill in the legislature would tie recently approved teacher pay increases to inflation. 

MISSISSIPPI — New Study Says Holding Kids Back One Key Factor in Mississippi’s Reading Revolution

“A report released last week by ExcelinEd and Wheelock Educational Policy Center at Boston University should end the debate over the value of holding back students who are not reading at grade level by the end of third grade,” writes Dr. Kymyona Burk of ExcelinEd and former Mississippi state superintendent Carey Wright. The report points to the policy as a main driver behind Mississippi’s sharp increase in reading scores for fourth graders on the 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP. Mississippi was the only state to post gains in ELA on the exam. 

ILLINOIS — Chicago Spent Big on Summer School in 2022. But Tracking Participation Proved Difficult

Chicago Public Schools is working through a secondary challenge posed by historic amounts of federal recovery dollars and the relatively rapid deployment of out-of-school and summer programs: tracking enrollment and participation. Data obtained by Chalkbeat show record sign-ups for summer programs after then-new Chicago Superintendent Pedro Martinez urged schools to “go big” on summer learning. However, the data makes it tricky to discern how many actually registered, how frequently and to what extent students showed up, and what kinds of positive impacts the investments may have had on learning or social and emotional health. The district says it’s at work to improve data collection and reporting for the summer of 2023.

KANSAS — State Program to Give $1,000 to Some Families to Fight Learning Loss. Here’s How to Apply

The Kansas Education Enrichment Program (KEEP), announced recently by Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, aims to provide families with up to $1,000 to spend on “educational goods and services” meant to help recover lost learning incurred during the pandemic. Funding for KEEP comes from Kansas’ share of the American Rescue Plan Act’s State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund.

TENNESSEE — What Do Teachers Think About Curriculum Quality? Tennessee Knows

“It’s one (commendable) thing for states to prioritize access to high-quality instructional materials and training for educators,” writes policy expert Jocelyn Pickford on the CurriculumHQ platform, “it’s another (even more commendable) thing to track and study how those priorities are actually showing up in classrooms.” Pickford spotlights data from the recent Tennessee Educator Survey showing “a deep dive into teachers’ beliefs about curriculum and professional learning quality, among several other topics.” Of note: 87% of teachers (regardless of subject) said their professional learning has been closely aligned to the instructional materials that have been adopted by their district and have led to improvements in their classroom instruction. Learn more on CurriculumHQ. 

NORTH CAROLINA — House Committee OKs Software for Learning Loss

North Carolina’s House Education Committee has approved the use of federal pandemic recovery funds to be used to provide districts with access to Gooru Navigator, a program that “provides teachers and parents with up-to-the-minute performance data on how students are performing in the classroom,” for up to three years. Jamey Faulkenberry, director of government affairs for the N.C. Department of Public Instruction, told lawmakers the distinguishing feature of Gooru Navigator is that other platforms can feed into it, making the software more workable for localities.

NEVADA — Governor Joe Lombardo Orders K-12 Audits in an Attempt to Improve the State’s Public Education System

After campaigning partially on increasing transparency and accountability for K-12 public schools in the state, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo has ordered third-party audits of all schools to be delivered to his office, with the goal of soon providing recommendations on how to improve K-12 outcomes in the state. The 14 various forms of audit include those on financial compliance and civil rights and must be submitted to the governor’s office by March 1.

This update on pandemic recovery in education collects and shares news updates from the district, state, and national levels as all stakeholders continue to work on developing safe, innovative plans to resume schooling and address learning loss. It’s an offshoot of the Collaborative for Student Success’ QuickSheet newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

Either one-on-one or in small groups, researchers say tutoring may be among the best approaches for helping youth quickly recoup lost ground. And armed with $190 billion in federal stimulus spending, the nation’s schools now have the resources to invest in new programs.

But launching an effective tutoring initiative requires more than just financial investment. Schools must answer key questions about how to structure the program: Which students will participate? What curricula will they follow? How long will sessions be? Will they take place during school or outside of it? Who will work as the tutors?

Matthew Kraft is an associate professor of education at Brown University and a leading voice on tutoring as an intervention to accelerate students’ learning. In 2021, he published a paper laying out a blueprint for how schools might effectively scale tutoring programs to help youth catch up after COVID. Finding the right curriculum and structure can lay the foundation for strong results — and can even ease staffing woes, he explained.

“The stronger the tutoring infrastructure,” said Kraft, “the less the program will rely on the individual skills that a tutor brings with them. And so it really opens up the potential labor supply pool to a much greater degree.”

The 74 spoke with Kraft over Zoom to find out what school leaders interested in tutoring should consider as they design their interventions and what pitfalls they should avoid.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The 74: Can you tell me, in brief, why you’ve chosen to focus so much of your research on tutoring? What’s the potential to help students catch up on missed learning from the pandemic?

Kraft: I started studying tutoring as a doctoral student almost 15 years ago. Part of that was motivated because I have worked as both a volunteer and as a paid private tutor. It was a formative experience to be able to work one-on-one with students and see them make rapid gains in their understanding, whether it be algebra or reading. As a classroom teacher, you just don’t have nearly as many opportunities for sustained one-on-one interaction to develop those relationships. So from my own experience, I knew tutoring really had a lot of potential. 

As I began to learn more, it became clear that there’s a huge potential to move the spectrum of how we deliver instruction in public schools so that it’s not only group instruction but also individualized personalized instruction. So I started to study Match Charter School (where leaders had implemented a tutoring model), which led to the thought experiment of saying, ‘Why isn’t this something that we do more broadly? Why is it a service that those who can afford it pay for in the private market, but not something that we offer more widely in our public education system?’

Then the pandemic opened a larger public conversation. It created the opportunity to say, not only has there been huge potential for tutoring, but now we’re facing a moment where there’s an incredible need to support students at a more individualized level and accelerate their learning. So all of that came together to really motivate the work that I am doing right now.

You mentioned tutoring is what wealthy families turn to when their kids fall behind in school, and that resonated because it shows we intuitively know tutoring works. It’s just that not everyone has the resources.

Yes, there’s a lot of intuitive appeal to tutoring. In the antiquities, in Roman and Greek times, that’s how a lot of the privileged class were educated. And that remained the form of private schooling with one-on-one tutors in much of the Elizabethan era and even into the Colonial era. As we expanded access to education, the model moved away from that, to some degree by necessity, but there’s just the sense that one-on-one feedback is the natural way we learn.

Now, to add to that, we have a deep and growing body of evidence examining its efficacy through rigorous experimental research. And when you look at that body of evidence, it is very compelling. That said, it largely is built on evidence of small- to medium-scale programs implemented in person prior to the pandemic under favorable circumstances. And that’s not what we’re doing today, trying to scale tutoring to an entirely new level.

For school leaders trying to roll out new tutoring programs, what factors do you think they should consider when they’re picking out curricula?

The first question districts and schools need to answer is, ‘What is the intended outcome of a tutoring program? What are the goals?’ Because it may be that the goal is to support students belonging in school, their social-emotional development, as much as it is to accelerate their learning. It could be both. By first answering that question, I think that helps the program to backward map onto the type of curriculum that would be best suited to meet those goals. 

Often there’s a bit of a slippage that happens. There’s this notion that tutoring is a good thing writ large and so if we do something individually with tutors and students, that will produce positive outcomes. I think that’s wishful thinking. It requires a lot more purposeful alignment between choosing a curriculum that is both built on strong instructional materials, but that also complements the type of instruction students are receiving in their larger traditional classes. It doesn’t need to be the same curriculum, but it’s less productive to have tutoring use a curriculum that’s completely divorced from what students are doing in the classroom. They should be compliments.

Do you have practical tips for how school leaders can go about doing that? Who’s best suited to make the call on curricula? Maybe department heads?

The reality is there are a wealth of curricular materials designed for trained teachers [in a full classroom]. And then there is a potpourri of one-off materials for tutoring. And so there’s not as rich of a supply of curricular materials available that are designed to be able to be implemented by a tutor who has limited experience working with students. 

A key is to ask whether the tutoring materials could be used effectively by someone with some training and support, but not necessarily a formally trained teacher. When I’m searching for materials, do these materials feel accessible to a wide range of potential tutors?

That means they should be able to be broken down into very explicit instructional steps and should come with a scope and sequence that allow you to do very short formative assessments of students to figure out where to reinforce their knowledge and shore up their foundation. 

Materials also need a clear instructional sequence over the duration of a tutoring period. Some curriculum materials may be designed for a 60-minute class, but tutoring sessions may be for 30 minutes. And so, [leaders] need to map that on to the design of the tutoring program itself. And in every context, I think there is going to be some individualization required. 

So it sounds like I’m hearing that if schools get those structural components right — like finding curricula that align with classroom standards, for example, or designing lessons to match the amount of time for tutoring sessions — they can actually unlock a new pool of possible tutors. Which strikes me as important because teacher burnout is so high right now and staffing has been an issue for some programs.

I think that’s a key observation. The stronger the tutoring infrastructure — to support tutors with strong instructional materials, ongoing coaching and feedback, peer learning networks and a leadership team that will troubleshoot issues that come up like technical problems or attendance challenges — the more success tutors will have and the less the program will rely on the individual skills that a tutor brings with them. And so it really opens up the potential labor supply pool to a much greater degree.

So now in this current moment, we see a lot of districts actually moving to implement tutoring programs to help students catch up on missed learning from COVID. In these last couple years, what have we learned?

A huge advantage of the decentralized nature of public education in the United States is that there’s an amazing amount of innovation and experimentation that happens. A lot of districts are developing tutoring programs on their own and it looks different across a whole bunch of places. Those districts are individually learning a huge amount about what worked, what didn’t work. And if they continue to invest in those programs over time, there will hopefully be continuous improvement.

Where we fall short is in helping districts to share those best practices and [also what they learn about what] practices we should leave on the scrap pile of design improvement. There are efforts at the state and federal levels to build these networks and I think those have a huge role to play. 

At the same time, researchers like myself and a whole host of others are working in partnership with districts to study tutoring programs in dozens of different contexts. But it’s hard to do that while delivering rigorous research designs, which may not always be feasible in these Wild West contexts, at the same time as trying to roll it out as fast as we can. Research can be a slow process and is not always able to inform program design in real time.

We’re starting to see some new evidence coming out that districts are struggling to implement tutoring at scale and deliver the high-dosage model that we think is necessary. Some efforts to contract with 24/7 on-demand tutoring providers has led to less-than-expected uptake. And the uptake has skewed more toward students who may already be having some degree of success in school rather than [serving] students who are struggling most.

When you say the high-dosage model isn’t quite being hit, what exactly does that mean?

Districts are aiming to deliver tutoring on a regular basis to students multiple times per week. And maybe they’re shooting to do that for 1,000 students, but instead they’re only getting 100 students to come with regularity. Maybe that’s because there are transportation problems, communication problems, technology problems, tutor-supply challenges. All of those things are, at least in this initial rollout, expected implementation challenges. Taking an effective program and scaling it is, historically, something that our decentralized education system has always struggled to do well.

To school leaders who are thinking of iterating on these programs or rolling them out if they haven’t launched them yet, anything that, based on your research, they should really try to avoid?

There’s compelling evidence that efforts to scale tutoring by simply adding more kids to a tutoring session — while tempting because it means you can serve more students — is going to quickly lose its efficacy. It just ceases to be personalized and starts to look like group instruction. That’s one common pitfall. 

A second common pitfall is failing to eliminate the barriers to accessing tutoring on a regular basis. If tutoring is moved to after the school day, some kids have other commitments. [If it’s online], some kids may not have the support to troubleshoot technology or may not have the technology itself. The more that we can reduce those access barriers, the more successful schools will be at delivering tutoring at scale and delivering tutoring with the high-dosage frequency that we think is necessary for it to be effective.

I think schools have to be clear-eyed about the trade-offs of different design changes. [They should aim to] scaffold these programs so the program is driving success and tutors can parachute into it and be bolstered by the great infrastructure, with students showing up ready to roll, knowing the routine.

In the last two weeks, I talked with administrators tasked with expanding tutoring in major school districts and states serving hundreds of thousands of students in aggregate. In each case, they estimated that their districts regularly reach closer to 5% of students with high-impact tutoring. These districts, covering multiple states, are on the leading edge of tracking implementation with well-constructed data systems, and they have done the hard work of building internal units to support schools as they implement tutoring using research-driven best practices. If even they are not reaching 10% of students, it is difficult to imagine that the rest of the country is managing to do the same. 

I worry that policymakers will pretend high-dosage tutoring is happening at scale and then, when student outcomes do not measurably improve, declare that it hasn’t worked. This has happened before, whether the issue was reforms aimed at teacher evaluation, expansion of school choice or implementation of higher academic standards. As a country, our short attention spans often lead us to declare that initiatives have failed before they have been adequately attempted.

This cannot happen with tutoring, both because it works and because it has enormous potential to scale in the years ahead. Our first year of doing this work at Accelerate has given me three reasons for optimism. 

First, research continues to show that tutoring is a powerful tool to catch students up and boost them forward. We are supporting research through a number of university partners, and evidence will continue to come out in the months ahead that shows high levels of impact for well-constructed tutoring programs. 

Second, early evidence suggests there are multiple ways to effectively deliver tutoring — not just the frequent, in-person, one-to-one or small group models that have been tested in the past. We have grantees using in-person instruction, remote delivery of person-to-person tutoring, artificial intelligence-enabled programs with human facilitation and additional hybrid models. Final research must bear this out, but initial data from grantees and preliminary studies of other programs suggest that some technology-enhanced and hybrid programs will advance academic outcomes at rates similar to those of in-person models. 

Third, our grantees are proving that a wide range of adults can be effective tutors. Deans for Impact’s tutoring model employs aspiring classroom teachers working toward their graduate degrees and pairs them with students in local schools. Teach for America trains college students to become tutors. Once utilizes paraprofessionals. And the Oakland REACH recruits parents to become tutors for students in their very own school district. While not every person can be a good tutor — and all tutors require some structured training and professional development — the country has a lot of untapped human potential that could be cultivated to make tutoring available to every student in every classroom.

These strides give me confidence that tutoring can scale to significantly improve student outcomes. So how do we get there? 

At a high level, it needs to be easier and more affordable for schools and districts to implement. And doing that, means there must be significant progress building effective policy and a base of highly effective providers.

Even before the pandemic, administrators were stretched thin, and predictably, many districts are struggling to integrate high-dosage tutoring programs at scale. This year, Accelerate’s Call to Effective Action grants will prioritize classroom-ready solutions that take place during the school day and contain built-in mechanisms for tracking results.

Additionally, states can remove barriers and issue specific guidance on grant and funding opportunities. They can offer models and waivers for implementing tutoring during the school day. And they can set expectations for accountability and reporting student progress. Next month, Accelerate will announce our States Leading Recovery grantees — state education agencies and statewide nonprofits working on policy frameworks and technical assistance to scale tutoring models during the school day. 

This week, at SXSW EDU, I am moderating a discussion with Shalinee Sharma, CEO of Zearn; A.J. Gutierrez, co-founder of Saga Education; and Lisa Coons, who oversees tutoring initiatives in the Tennessee Department of Education. Each of them is spearheading efforts to not only expand tutoring, but to reduce the cost while still maintaining a high bar for quality. 

Over time, collectively, we can help build up the number of evidence-backed models that are easier for schools to implement. We can also help states (and the federal government) to create policy frameworks, funding and support to help local schools. None of this will be easy. All of it is possible. But only if we’re clear-eyed about how far we have to go, what obstacles stand in our way and what it will take to remove them.

I know, looking to our state for inspiration isn’t generally a natural instinct. After all, we ranked 52nd in the nation in elementary math on the Nation’s Report Card in 2019. On the 2022 assessment, however, Alabama moved up 12 spots. Furthermore, the state’s fourth-graders lost no ground in math even as students nationally saw steep declines amid the pandemic.

This progress isn’t happening by chance. Alabama’s leaders and educators are working hard to bring about continued positive change. In 2019, they improved the state standards, making them more rigorous and aligned with those used to develop the Nation’s Report Card, also known as the National Assessment of Educational Standards. Districts then started moving to better, standards-aligned instructional resources. 

The state also created a new assessment that is aligned with those standards, and some schools used pandemic relief funding for digital math tools and math specialists. Last spring, policymakers passed the Numeracy Act, designed to improve math instruction in a comprehensive way.

While many states have laws aimed at improving literacy, Alabama among them, few have taken similar steps to systematically improve math instruction.

The hope is that the new math law will drive continued progress among Alabama students, much as the literacy law has led to reading gains. The law establishes a state task force that will ensure teachers get strong training and evidence-based resources in their classrooms to improve math instruction. The task force is sharing information about high-quality curriculum and assessment systems and is designing professional development programs to ensure teachers have substantial math knowledge and teaching practices. 

All elementary schools will get math coaches to provide ongoing, on-site support for teachers. K-5 schools serving more than 800 students will get two coaches. The state is also developing an initiative to help qualified classroom teachers become math coaches.

As an elementary school principal and former middle and high school math teacher, I’ve seen firsthand how much teachers need this kind of help. The math taught today is much more rigorous than the math many of us learned as kids. There is greater emphasis on understanding concepts and the application of math, rather than simply memorizing rules and procedures. Teachers need to fully understand math concepts themselves to effectively teach it. 

I’m fortunate that my school is among those that already has a math coach. I tapped her recently to work with a teacher who just wasn’t as confident teaching math as she was in reading and other subjects. They worked together over time on areas in which the teacher was struggling, and the improvement was visible.

The coach recently watched one of the teacher’s students perform well on a challenging task. The child’s eyes lit up; though she had previously struggled in math, confidence was visible on her face. When the teacher and coach discussed the student’s progress, the teacher cried with joy and explained that before, she would have given the student less rigorous work. She realized the difference she was now able to make in the classroom and in her students’ lives because of the coaching she had received.

Moments like these make me so proud of the progress we’re making.

Other provisions of the new law include improving training for aspiring teachers enrolled in education schools and for principals, especially those in low-performing schools. And there’s a new summer program for fourth- and fifth graders who struggle with math. Grades K-3 students who attend reading literacy camp will also have opportunities to address math gaps — especially important as summer slide can be a particular problem in math.

To gauge the law’s impact, an outside reviewer will study and evaluate these efforts. 

Alabama would not be the first Southern state with high poverty rates and low education rankings to provide inspiration when it comes to addressing an urgent problem facing the schools. Our neighbors in Mississippi led the nation with the passage of a landmark law in 2013 that improved reading instruction and propelled the state from last in reading instruction to seeing the fastest gains in the country.
It takes this kind of systematic, coordinated and funded state support to see large-scale student academic growth across the state. It will also require all who care for children and their education to develop a growth mindset and truly believe that all students can be successful in learning mathematics. Given the pandemic’s impact on student learning, all states should act now. Although Alabama’s Numeracy Act is in its infancy, I hope other states will follow our lead.

Even so, the test’s administrators are interpreting the flatline at 54% as good news. Paul Gazzerro, director of data analysis at curriculum provider Amplify, said it’s likely that third graders would have fallen even further behind without efforts like tutoring and additional group instruction.

“It looks as if nothing happened, but the reality is I would’ve suspected that things could’ve gotten worse,” he said. “These are students in many cases that are missing very tangible skills. They may even be grade levels behind.”

The results come amid brighter news for younger students. The mid-year data, which reflects the performance of about 300,000 students across 43 states, show that more K-2 students are reading on grade level compared with 2022 — a sign that literacy skills overall continue to slowly inch back to pre-COVID levels. 

“The actual pandemic effect seems to be lessening,” Gazzerro said.

Amplify’s latest early literacy snapshot reflects a far less disruptive year than the last one. Schools aren’t dealing with frequent quarantines as they did during last year’s Omicron wave. In addition, many states and districts are in the midst of revamping how they teach reading and are using federal relief funds to purchase new curriculum and train teachers.

In some cases, states are taking the lead. Tennessee has put $100 million toward teacher training and ensuring districts have a phonics-based reading curriculum to match. And the Texas Education Agency will soon publish a list of approved materials to follow up a state law requiring districts to teach phonics.

At The 74’s request, Burbio, a data company, scanned 6,500 districts’ plans for spending American Rescue Plan funds. Over 3,800 report an emphasis on literacy, more than 4,100 mention reading and over 2,586 note ELA or English language arts. A smaller number, 530, specifically included phonics, and 258 identified science of reading in their plans.

It’s too soon to know whether these developments have had a measurable impact on students’ skills, but they’re “not hurting, that’s for sure,” said Susan Lambert, Amplify’s chief academic officer for elementary humanities. 

The return to a more predictable schedule has contributed to the growth as well, she added.

“We can make progress when kids are in the classroom,” she said. “The data shows that.” 

Amplify uses an assessment called Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, to test student progress toward learning letter sounds and blends, recognizing sight words and gaining speed and accuracy. 

Students in K-2 haven’t caught up to peers who were in those grades just before COVID hit. But they did make more progress between fall and winter than students did last year. That’s especially true for the youngest students. In 2021-22, the percentage of kindergartners on track grew 15 points over that time period. This year, it grew 19 percentage points. 

‘Can’t spell Harry or Potter’

For teachers, it’s rewarding to see their students leap from identifying one or two sounds in a word to accurately writing complete sentences. 

JoLynn Aldinger, who teaches first grade in the West Ada School District, near Boise, Idaho, said her students’ growth over the past five months makes her want to “do cartwheels” in the classroom. 

A 25-year veteran teacher, she used to emphasize stories and comprehension over phonics. But when she had a 7-year-old in her class who took longer than her peers to learn letter sounds, Aldinger set off on her own quest to learn more about the so-called “science of reading.” 

‘I thought, ‘I have a master’s degree in reading. I should know how to teach reading,’ ” she said. “I knew what phonics was but I didn’t understand how explicit it needed to be.”

She applied for a grant from her school’s PTA, which paid $1,275 for her to receive training in methods often used with students who have dyslexia. The techniques, like pounding out syllables on their desks and spending extra time on letter blends, benefit even her strongest readers, she said. 

“I would have kids walk in my classroom who have read ‘Harry Potter,’ but they can’t spell Harry or Potter,” she said. 

Now she shows off her students’ improvement to anyone who will listen. And she asks other teachers if they’ve listened to “Sold a Story,” a podcast about how whole language or “balanced” literacy came to dominate reading instruction in U.S. schools. Research shows the approach, which focuses more on access to books and using pictures or other clues to guess words, can leave students without the phonics skills to become strong readers.  

‘Our COVID kids’

The Amplify data includes other indicators that trends are headed in the right direction. Racial gaps in reading — which grew larger during the pandemic — have narrowed slightly. And between Hispanic and white students, the disparities are even smaller than before COVID.

Since 2019-20, the gap between Hispanic and white kindergartners needing “intensive” support, for example, has fallen from 14 to 11 percentage points. And in third grade, the gap between Hispanic and white students on track dropped from 13 to 8 percentage points over the same time period. For Black students, it remains at 19 percentage points. 

Third grade, Lambert said, is when foundational skills “are supposed to come together” for students so they can learn from what they’re reading. 

That’s what Jean Hesson, elementary supervisor for the Sumner County Schools in Tennessee, hopes to see this spring when this year’s third graders take the state test. 

“These are our COVID kids,” she said. Even though the district has adopted a strong curriculum, “ultimately you have 20 wildcards sitting in front of you. You have to know where your kids are.”

As in districts statewide, Sumner teachers are now required to use phonics-based instruction. The district adopted the Wit and Wisdom curriculum for reading about history, science and other topics. It added the Fundations program for phonics and Geodes — a set of books that tie content and literacy skills together.

“The pictures don’t lend themselves to guessing words,” Hesson said. Students “truly have to decode and use their skills.” 

Almost 45% of last year’s third graders met or exceeded English language arts standards — an increase over pre-pandemic scores. Hesson is hoping that trend continues.

“If we had not had high-quality materials, teachers would have been teaching in a million different directions,” she said. “I can’t imagine the gaps that we would have created.” 

In recent weeks, at least seven states have advanced discussions or legislation around “school choice” measures like charter school expansions and the establishment of Education Savings Accounts, which allow families to use state education funds towards attendance at private schools. Largely modeled on previous school choice efforts in Florida and Arizona, among others, states like Nebraska, Iowa, Utah, and Arkansas are forging ahead with their efforts to allow use of education funds outside of traditional public school systems.

Looking beyond parental choice, here are ten other updates from across the country about how states and school systems are confronting the challenges posed by COVID-19 and its variants — and working to preserve student progress amid the pandemic:

CONNECTICUT — A State Program to Reduce Chronic Absenteeism Is Working

A new report by an Education Research Collaborative between the Connecticut Education Department and prominent state research institutions — including Yale University, the University of Connecticut, and Wesleyan University — demonstrated remarkable success for a pandemic program implemented in some 15 Connecticut school districts. The program — called the Learning Engagement and Attendance Program or LEAP — was fueled by federal recovery dollars and leveraged trained family support staff to conduct home visits to families of students deemed chronically absent. Since 2021, home visitors have helped hundreds of families navigate distinct challenges like employment, housing, mental and physical healthcare, substance abuse, and the immigration system to ensure students attend school regularly and on-time. The study found an average improvement in chronic absenteeism rates of 15 percentage points, with some districts — like Hartford Public Schools — experiencing gains nearly twice that size.

INDIANA — State Doles Out $2.2 Million in STEM Grant Funding

The Indiana Department of Education recently announced that 48 school districts and charter schools across the state will receive close to $2.2 million in STEM Integration Grant funding. The STEM Integration Grant seeks to increase access and support for schools to offer more learning opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math.

ILLINOIS — State Superintendent Proposes $516 Million More for Education

Illinois lawmakers are considering a budget request from outgoing State Superintendent Carmen Ayala to raise K-12 spending from $9.8 billion to about $10.3 billion, or a 5.3% increase. The request includes roughly $350 million more for K-12 schools, $60 million more for pre-K programs, and additional increases for “transportation, special education, and free meals,” according to Chalkbeat. 

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams Promises Mental Telehealth Support for all NYC High School Students

Amid spiraling concern about student wellbeing in the nation’s largest school district, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that all the city’s high school-aged students would soon have free access to mental health resources via a telehealth program. Framed as “the biggest student mental health program in the nation,” the announcement was met with cautious optimism from school and health professionals in the city. “It raises lots of procedural questions which maybe they will fill in later, but it’s hard for me not to focus on those right away,” said Kevin Dahill-Fuchel, the executive director of Counseling in Schools. 

PENNSYLVANIA — High Schools Could Start Offering Students K-12 Education Training Next School Year

To expose students to careers in education and further develop and diversify the teacher pipeline, the Pennsylvania Department of Education will begin offering K-12 education as a new career and technical education (CTE) program starting next school year. Schools can choose to offer the program informally or with department approval: the latter will make schools eligible for state and federal funding, according to Pennsylvania’s CTE director, Lee Burket. 

TENNESSEE — State Schools Need $9 Billion of Infrastructure Investment, Report Says

According to a new state report, Tennessee needs to invest more than $9 billion in its K-12 education infrastructure to tackle needs for renovations and technology improvements, as well as to build additions and new schools. The state received over $4 billion in federal relief funds, but under direction from Gov. Bill Lee, districts were encouraged to put at least half of their portions toward education recovery programs and resources. The report cites research that indicates investments in K-12 infrastructure can improve learning, health, and behavior, while noting local and state officials struggle to determine how to cover these costs. 

MICHIGAN — Whitmer’s Fifth State of the State Prioritizes Expanded Preschool, Tutoring

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s fifth State of the State address included multiple nods to expanded education programming in the state, including a push for universal preschool for all 4-year-olds and large-scale tutoring to middle- and high-school students. Whitmer’s plans are expected to be thoroughly debated, even as she enjoys a Democratic majority in the state legislature and a state budget surplus, as advocates call attention to sharp staffing challenges and increasing clamor for expanded school choice policies.

NEBRASKA — Teacher Shortage Worsening Across Nebraska, State Report Says

The number of unfilled teaching positions in Nebraska is up 60% over the last year, according to a district survey conducted by the state department of education. Though the unfilled positions represent just under 3% of total positions in the state, officials say the increases reflect a “shrinking applicant pool” that is posing particular challenges for hard-to-staff subjects, like special education, career programs, and language arts.

HAWAII — State Outlines Plan for 465 More Pre-K Classrooms by 2032

Education leaders’ goal of providing pre-K opportunities for all children in Hawaii within the next decade is kicking off with the planned construction or refurbishment of 80 classrooms by August 2024. The $200 million plan will see 50 additional pre-K classrooms added every year through 2032 and places Hawaii amongst a small group of states that have approved large-scale expansions of pre-K programs.

MINNESOTA — Governor Proposes Child Tax Credits, Universal Free Lunch, Boost in K-12 Education Funding

Gov. Tim Walz has proposed a substantial K-12 education package which details an expansive education and childcare plan that includes efforts to increase affordable childcare, universal free meals for Minnesota students, and a child tax credit for low income families. “This budget will tackle and eliminate child poverty, put money into families’ pockets and fund our schools,” said Gov. Walz. Walz was met with criticism from lawmakers across the aisle, who argue the proposed budget would send funds to schools that are failing to address low test scores and large achievement gaps.

This update on pandemic recovery in education collects and shares news updates from the district, state, and national levels as all stakeholders continue to work on developing safe, innovative plans to resume schooling and address learning loss. It’s an offshoot of the Collaborative for Student Success’ QuickSheet newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

That’s essentially unchanged from last school year, but significantly worse than before the pandemic, when only 36% of students started school off track, the National Center for Education Statistics has found. 

Additionally, over 80% of the 1,026 schools that responded to the the latest School Pulse Panel survey said they’re providing some form of tutoring to help students catch up. But the latest post-pandemic snapshot reinforces the sense that the pace of academic recovery remains slow. 

“We’ve got a long road ahead of us,” said Rachel Hansen, a project officer at NCES. 

Districts have about a year and a half left to decide the best way to use their share of $189 billion in federal pandemic relief funds. And with the clock ticking, some experts question whether districts will be able to have a measurable impact on learning loss. About half of the administrators who responded to the latest survey said they’re spending relief funds on providing students with extra academic support and training staff to become tutors. But the survey, conducted in December, showed that just 1 in 10 students nationally received high-dosage tutoring.

Students are “not the same level of ready” they were before the pandemic, said Beth Lehr, assistant principal at Sahuarita High School, south of Tucson. “We had a major world event that upended a whole bunch of different things.”

Some students in this year’s junior and senior classes missed entire semesters of a course during their early high school years, when the pandemic was at its peak. The district tweaked its existing credit recovery program to allow those students to learn the material and graduate on time. 

The NCES data found that schools are employing a variety of recovery strategies to get students back on grade level, including using assessments to identify their needs (88%), covering material students missed (81%) and holding longer classes (29%). Schools were least likely to extend the school day (19%) or extend the school year (10%). 

The latest installment also provided a detailed look at schools’ efforts to implement high-dosage tutoring, which Stanford University researcher Susanna Loeb called the “best approach that we know for accelerating students’ learning” because it offers students help from “an adult who knows them, cares about them and has the tools to address their needs.” 

She has been tracking the implementation of large-scale tutoring efforts across the country as part of the National Student Support Accelerator and called the survey results “the most comprehensive information out there” on how schools are addressing learning loss.

More than a third of schools (37%) say they offer high-dosage tutoring, defined as at least a half hour of one-on-one or small group instruction three times a week with a trained educator. But less than a third of students in those schools participate, according to NCES.

Schools offering a high-impact model primarily lean on existing staff — teachers and aides — to provide it. And they’re more likely to schedule sessions during the school day, 64%, compared with 51% after school.

“Our teachers are our experts,” said Michael Randolph, principal at Leesburg High School in Leesburg, Florida, where about 150 to 200 students participate in tutoring sessions throughout the week. He said teachers have been willing to put in the extra time because they see the payoff. 

His school combines tutoring with twice-a-week remediation sessions added to the schedule the year COVID hit. He thinks those efforts contributed to the school ending last semester with the lowest number of D’s and F’s since he became principal six years ago. 

But some schools responding to the survey faced ongoing barriers. Forty percent said they can’t find tutors and 49% said that even with relief funds, they lack the funding to hire them.

Lehr said it’s been hard to get teachers to add tutoring to their plate because they are “almost on empty.” If they’re “tapped out,” she added, it doesn’t make sense for them to tack two more hours of work onto their day for another $50.

Schools that are more likely to offer high-dosage tutoring, the data shows, serve elementary students, have high poverty rates and high minority populations and are located in cities. There are also regional differences, with schools in the South offering the most high-dosage tutoring (15%) and those in the Northeast offering the least (5%).

Fifty-nine percent of students receive what the researchers described as “standard” tutoring, which might still be in small groups, but not as frequent. And 22% have access to “self-paced” tutoring from an online provider. 

Those services are “useful supplements” for students who might need a little help in a subject area, Loeb said, but the less-intensive approaches are unlikely to “alter the trajectories of students who have disengaged in school or who have fallen far behind academically.” 

Randolph, at Leesburg High, said he thinks the best decision his district made with relief funds was to add a night school to accommodate students who still work jobs they took during the pandemic. The school has received $250,000 a year to run the program, but when relief funds run out, Randolph said he’ll have to find another way to fund it. About 50 students participate. 

“A lot of our students took entry level jobs and became contributors to their households,” he said. When remote learning ended, he said, many students would have dropped out. “This has maintained students’ ability to stay in school.”

The pandemic’s devastating impact on student learning provided an opportunity for community leaders in Indianapolis and around the country to think about summer learning differently. Rather than the traditional out-of-school program focus on remediation, students need access to grade-level content in order to truly accelerate their learning.

In 2021, The Mind Trust teamed up with United Way of Central Indiana to launch Indy Summer Learning Labs. For five weeks in summer 2021 and 2022, thousands of Indianapolis students attended rigorous, high-quality summer programming designed to ensure the pandemic did not derail their educational futures.

Sites were located both within schools and community organizations, so students and families could choose the option that worked best for them. The results were remarkable. In summer 2022, the labs served 5,000 students at 39 sites across the city. For a second year running, students dramatically increased their academic proficiency. Here are some examples of the results:

• A 25-percentage-point increase in basic and proficient scores for English language arts
• A 24-point increase in basic and proficient scores for math
• A 15-point increase in overall English and math scores
• Perhaps most convincing, the Indiana Department of Education commissioned an external study that found learning lab students achieved statistically significant gains above their pre-pandemic rates of learning and did better than their peers who did not participate in the program
• 93% of participating families rated their experience as good or great

Importantly, the summer learning labs served a demographically and socioeconomically representative sample of Indianapolis’ student population. In 2022, 79% of participating students were children of color, and 68% came from low-income backgrounds. It is clear that the learning labs served the students who most needed rigorous summer programming. And it served them well.

A key factor in the program’s success was the Lavinia Group’s rigorous RISE curriculum, which was customized to match Indiana’s state standards for each grade level.

As a former educator, I understand the impulse to stick with remediation. When you’re working with middle schoolers whose average reading ability is at a third grade level, it’s tempting to give them third-grade material. But this well-meaning tendency actually does a great disservice to the students, who should be afforded opportunities to gain grade-level mastery by accessing grade-level content.

Students who need the most support are too often given remediation when research is clear that what they need is grade-level material matched with adult support. Two years of data in Indianapolis proves when students get rigorous instruction and the support they need, they rise to the occasion and make significant progress.

The summer learning labs were able to produce such transformative outcomes due to three design decisions that supported the use of a high-quality curriculum: the program at all sites was free or low-cost; we hired over 100 licensed teachers to deliver instruction; and the student experience balanced rigorous academics with daily enrichment, such as fields trips, art projects and outdoor recreation. Feedback from families, teachers and the students themselves was clear: Kids wanted to show up, and they learned a lot in just five weeks as a result.

Inspired in part by Indy Summer Learning Labs, New York City took a similar approach last summer, thanks to the leadership of Bloomberg Philanthropies. Summer Boost NYC served more than 17,000 students last summer, with many schools using the RISE curriculum. That proves that this type of summer learning approach is replicable in other cities and potentially a model for other out-of-school programs, such as during spring break or after school.

As for our work in Indianapolis, our vision is that the learning labs will eventually be an independent nonprofit and serve as the enduring academic acceleration engine for the city’s students. To do this, we plan to advocate in the Indiana General Assembly for recognition that continued investments in proven models like Indy Summer Learning Labs are vital for accelerating learning in the wake of the pandemic. Other states and education philanthropists would benefit from pursuing similar strategies. The nation cannot treat efforts to mitigate learning loss as one-off investments and just move on to the next shiny object. It will take a sustained effort over time to achieve the learning gains that students deserve.

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74. City Fund provides financial support to The Mind Trust and The 74.

A new bill would create a statewide education office to combat educational delays and regressions commonly cited as a result of pandemic-related school disruptions, one of a slew of bills lawmakers have introduced to combat so-called learning loss.

The measure (S3518) would create an Office of the Learning Loss Czar within the executive branch to work with the Department of Education. The new position would be tasked with finding educational tools that have shown to be effective in “identifying and reversing student learning loss.” Those tools would go to a “resource bank” that school districts could access and submit their own ideas to, the bill says.

The position would be a gubernatorial appointment and they would serve the length of that governor’s term.

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Few bills targeting learning loss have advanced out of the full Legislature. The one to create a learning loss czar was introduced by state Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), who has sponsored dozens of bills to increase the number of teachers statewide, require officials to study high school dropout rates, push for more studies on learning loss, and more.

Assemblywoman Vicky Flynn (R-Monmouth) has introduced her own bill to create a learning loss task force, which she suggested could be combined with Ruiz’s bill or other education legislation.

“Every day that passes that we don’t address how this impacts kids more and more, we’re widening the gaps that exist today,” Flynn said in an interview. “Until these bills are moved forward, I don’t think the Department of Education will take it seriously.”

Flynn said this should be a top priority of the Legislature. As long as these bills go without advancing, she said, “it’s a wasted opportunity to address this crisis.”

Results from standardized tests given last spring show students in grades 3 to 9 scored lower on nearly every measure since 2015, when the test was first administered. The data was our first glimpse at how COVID-related school disruptions affected test scores.

Flynn said while she’d like to work with Ruiz and other Democrats on policies addressing what students lost during the pandemic, she also wants to see bills that have already been introduced see some movement.

“Quite honestly, I don’t think any other educational bills should be presented unless they address learning loss, state funding, and mental health needs of our students. I think that needs to be a main focus as a Legislature right now,” she added.

The governor launched a partnership program in December for 5,000 volunteers and community organizations to work with struggling students.

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