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Education Dive
Is tutoring the answer to the COVID slide?
Roger Riddell
Aug. 11, 2020
Dive Brief:
Despite mounting research that well-done tutoring is significantly
effective in boosting student achievement, access has historically been
limited to students from affluent families, according to The Hechinger
Report.
While the impact face-to-face or virtual mass tutoring programs could
have on curbing the "COVID slide" is uncertain, experts suggest
increasing access to tutors might be critical in addressing learning
losses resulting from prolonged school closures and transitions to
online learning models.
One-on-one and small group tutoring has been shown to have the most
impact, but is also the most cost-prohibitive to low-income students —
who also often don't have access to the technology, physical space or
moral support to drive success in tutoring programs or distance
learning.
Dive Insight:
Addressing the "COVID slide" presents one of the most complicated
challenges of the pandemic beyond the transition to distance learning.
During a typical summer, there's already some expectation of a "summer
slide." A study published in July in the American Educational Research
Journal, using data from Northwest Evaluation Association, followed
students in grades 1 through 6 over five summers and found 52% of the
students lost an average of 39% of their total school year gains during
the summer months.
Students returning to school this fall, however, have the compounded
effect of not just the summer break, but of a spring disrupted by
school closures and the aforementioned switch to online learning
models. That transition was particularly prohibitive for many
low-income students whose families lacked home access to internet or
devices, or who have been in unstable home environments.
On the connectivity front alone, an estimated 16.9 million students (or
8.4 million households) lack home internet access, and 3.6 million
households lack a computer. Districts have worked to alleviate these
factors to the best of their ability, with some service providers also
helping out by offering free or reduced price internet, for example.
Even then, these are the needs and concerns taken into consideration
for providing standard educational services, let alone additional tutor
programming to assist in addressing learning loss. Addressing the slide
has been recognized by education leaders like Suzanne Newell, director
of academics for the Austin Independent School District in Texas, as an
equity issue, and others have acknowledged that fixing it will take
more than a semester.
But there's only so much districts can do with limited resources that
are expected to be stretched thinner as the coronavirus pandemic's
impact on tax revenues leads to expected K-12 funding cuts in state
budgets.
Powering tutor programs and other informal learning outlets will
require funds for additional staff, space and more, on top of support
for making that programming readily accessible to low-income students.
And selling that need to state and federal lawmakers alongside all the
other priorities could prove to be the greatest piece of the challenge
overall.
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