Writing lesson plans has traditionally been a big part of a teacher’s job.  But this doesn’t mean they should be starting from a blank slate. Ideally, teachers are supposed to base their lessons on the textbooks, worksheets and digital materials that school leaders have spent a lot of time reviewing and selecting. 

But a recent national survey of more than 1,000 math teachers reveals that many are rejecting the materials they should be using and cobbling together their own.

“A surprising number of math teachers, particularly at the high school level, simply said we don’t use the district or school-provided materials, or they claimed they didn’t have any,” said William Zahner, an associate professor of mathematics at San Diego State University, who presented the survey at the April 2024 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia. Students, he said, are often being taught through a “bricolage” of materials that teachers assemble themselves from colleagues and the internet. 

“What I see happening is a lot of math teachers are rewriting a curriculum that has already been written,” said Zahner. 

The survey results varied by grade level. More than 75 percent of elementary school math teachers said they used their school’s recommended materials, but fewer than 50 percent of high school math teachers said they did. 

Share of math teachers who use their school’s recommended materials

The do-it-yourself approach has two downsides, Zahner said, both of which affect students. One problem is that it’s time consuming. Time spent finding materials is time not spent giving students feedback, tailoring existing lessons for students or giving students one-to-one tutoring help. The hunt for materials is also exhausting and can lead to teacher burnout, Zahner said.

Related: Education research, condensed. The free Proof Points newsletter delivers one story every Monday.

The other problem is that teacher-made materials may sacrifice the thoughtful sequencing of topics planned by curriculum designers.  When teachers create or take materials from various sources, it is hard to maintain a “coherent development” of ideas, Zahner explained. Curriculum designers may weave a review of previous concepts to reinforce them even as new ideas are introduced. Teacher-curated materials may be disjointed. Separate research has found that some of the most popular materials that teachers grab from internet sites, such as Teachers Pay Teachers, are not high quality. 

The national survey was conducted in 2021 by researchers at San Diego State University, including Zahner, who also directs the university’s Center for Research in Mathematics and Science Education, and the English Learners Success Forum, a nonprofit that seeks to improve the quality of instructional materials for English learners. The researchers sought out the views of teachers who worked in school districts where more than 10 percent of the students were classified as English learners, which is the national average. More than 1,000 math teachers, from kindergarten through 12th grade, responded. On average, 30 percent of their students were English learners, but some teachers had zero English learners and others had all English learners in their classrooms.

Teachers were asked about the drawbacks of their assigned curriculum for English learners. Many said that their existing materials weren’t connected to their students’ languages and cultures. Others said that the explanations of how to tailor a lesson to an English learner were too general to be useful.  Zahner says that teachers have a point and that they need more support in how to help English learners develop the language of mathematical reasoning and argumentation.

It was not clear from this survey whether the desire to accommodate English learners was the primary reason that teachers were putting together their own materials or whether they would have done so anyway. 

Related: Most English lessons on Teachers Pay Teachers and other sites are ‘mediocre’ or ‘not worth using,’ study finds

“There are a thousand reasons why this is happening,” said Zahner. One high school teacher in Louisiana who participated in the survey said his students needed a more advanced curriculum. Supervisors inside a school may not like the materials that officials in a central office have chosen. “Sometimes schools have the materials but they’re all hidden in a closet,” Zahner said.

In the midst of a national debate on how best to teach math, this survey is an important reminder of yet another reason why many students aren’t getting the instruction that they need. 

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

The post PROOF POINTS: Many high school math teachers cobble together their own instructional materials from the internet and elsewhere, a survey finds appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Educators around the country have embraced the “science of reading” in their classrooms, but that doesn’t mean there’s a truce in the reading wars. In fact, controversies are emerging about an important but less understood aspect of learning to read: phonemic awareness. 

That’s the technical name for showing children how to break down words into their component letter sounds and then fuse the sounds together. In a phonemic awareness lesson, a teacher might ask how many sounds are in the word cat.  The answer is three: “k,” “a,” and “t.” Then the class blends the sounds back into the familiar sounding word: from “kuh-aah-tuh” to “kat.” The 26 letters of the English alphabet produce 44 phonemes, which include unique sounds made from combinations of letters, such as “ch” and “oo.” 

Many schools have purchased scripted oral phonemic awareness lessons that do not include the visual display of letters. The oral lessons are popular because they are easy to teach and fun for students. And that’s the source of the current debate. Should kids in kindergarten or first grade be spending so much time on sounds without understanding how those sounds correspond to letters? 

A new meta-analysis confirms that the answer is no. In January 2024, five researchers from Texas A&M University published their findings online in the journal Scientific Studies of Reading. They found that struggling readers, ages 4 to 6, no longer benefited after 10.2 hours of auditory instruction in small group or tutoring sessions, but continued to make progress if visual displays of the letters were combined with the sounds. That means that instead of just asking students to repeat sounds, a teacher might hold up cards with the letters C, A and T printed on them as students isolate and blend the sounds.

Meta-analyses sweep up all the best research on a topic and use statistics to tell us where the preponderance of the evidence lies. This newest 2024 synthesis follows three previous meta-analyses on phonemic awareness in the past 25 years. While there are sometimes shortcomings in the underlying studies, the conclusions from all the phonemic meta-analyses appear to be pointing in the same direction. 

“If you teach phonemic awareness, students will learn phonemic awareness,” which isn’t the goal, said Tiffany Peltier, a learning scientist who consults on literacy training for teachers at NWEA, an assessment company. “If you teach blending and segmenting using letters, students are learning to read and spell.” 

Phonemic awareness has a complicated history. In the 1970s, researchers discovered that good readers also had a good sense of the sounds that constitute words. This sound awareness helps students map the written alphabet to the sounds, an important step in learning to read and write. Researchers proved that these auditory skills could be taught and early studies showed that they could be taught as a purely oral exercise without letters.

But science evolved. In 2000, the National Reading Panel outlined the five pillars of evidence-based reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. This has come to be known as the science of reading. By then, more studies on phonemic awareness had been conducted and oral lessons alone were not as successful. The reading panel’s meta-analysis of 52 studies showed that phonemic awareness instruction was almost twice as effective when letters were presented along with the sounds. 

Many schools ignored the reading panel’s recommendations and chose different approaches that didn’t systematically teach phonics or phonemic awareness. But as the science of reading grew in popularity in the past decade, phonemic awareness lessons also exploded. Teacher training programs in the science of reading emphasized the importance of phonemic awareness. Companies sold phonemic programs to schools and told teachers to teach it every day. Many of these lessons were auditory, including chants and songs without letters.

Researchers worried that educators were overemphasizing auditory training. A 2021 article, “They Say You Can Do Phonemic Awareness Instruction ‘In the Dark’, But Should You?” by nine prominent reading researchers criticized how phonemic awareness was being taught in schools. 

Twenty years after the reading panel’s report, a second meta-analysis came out in 2022 with even fresher studies but arrived at the same conclusion. Researchers from Baylor University analyzed over 130 studies and found twice the benefits for phonemic awareness when it was taught with letters. A third meta-analysis was presented at a poster session of the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.  It also found that instruction was more effective when sounds and letters were combined.

On the surface, adding letters to sounds might seem identical to teaching phonics. But some reading experts say phonemic awareness with letters still emphasizes the auditory skills of segmenting words into sounds and blending the sounds together. The visual display of the letter is almost like a subliminal teaching of phonics without explicitly saying, “This alphabetic symbol ‘a’ makes the sound ‘ah’.” Others explain that there isn’t a bright line between phonemic awareness and phonics and they can be taught in tandem.

The authors of the latest 2024 meta-analysis had hoped to give teachers more guidance on how much classroom time to invest on phonemic awareness. But unfortunately, the classroom studies they found didn’t keep track of the minutes. The researchers were left with only 16 high-quality studies, all of which were interventions with struggling students. These were small group or individual tutoring sessions on top of whatever phonemic awareness lessons children may also have been receiving in their regular classrooms, which was not documented. So it’s impossible to say from this meta-analysis exactly how much sound training students need. 

The lead author of the 2024 meta-analysis, Florina Erbeli, an education psychologist at Texas A&M, said that the 10.2 hours number in her paper isn’t a “magic number.” It’s just an average of the results of the 16 studies that met her criteria for being included in the meta-analysis. The right amount of phonemic awareness might be more or less, depending on the child. 

Erbeli said the bigger point for teachers to understand is that there are diminishing returns to auditory-only instruction and that students learn much more when auditory skills are combined with visible letters.

I corresponded with Heggerty, the market leader in phoneme awareness lessons, which says its programs are in 70 percent of U.S. school districts. The company acknowledged that the science of reading has evolved and that’s why it revised its phonemic awareness program in 2022 to incorporate letters and introduced a new program in 2023 to pair it with phonics. The company says it is working with outside researchers to keep improving the instructional materials it sells to schools. Because many schools cannot afford to buy a new instructional program, Heggerty says it also explains how teachers can modify older auditory lessons.

The company still recommends that teachers spend eight to 12 minutes a day on phonemic awareness through the end of first grade. This recommendation contrasts with the advice of many reading researchers who say the average kid doesn’t need this much. Many researchers say that phonemic awareness continues to develop automatically as the child’s reading skills improve without advanced auditory training. 

NWEA literacy consultant Peltier, whom I quoted earlier, suggests that phonemic awareness can be tapered off by the fall of first grade. More phonemic awareness isn’t necessarily harmful, but there’s only so much instructional time in the day. She thinks that precious minutes currently devoted to oral phonemic awareness could be better spent on phonics, building vocabulary and content knowledge through reading books aloud, classroom discussions and writing.

Another developer of a phonemic awareness program aimed at older, struggling readers is David Kilpatrick, professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Cortland. He told me that five minutes a day might be enough for the average student in a classroom, but some struggling students need a lot more. Kilpatrick disagrees with the conclusions of the meta-analyses because they lump different types of students together. He says severely dyslexic students need more auditory training. He explained that extra time is needed for advanced auditory work that helps these students build long-term memories, he said, and the meta-analyses didn’t measure that outcome.

Another reading expert, Susan Brady, professor emerita at the University of Rhode Island, concurs that some of the more advanced manipulations can help some students. Moving a sound in and out of a word can heighten awareness of a consonant cluster, such as taking the “l” out of the word “plant” to get “pant,” and then inserting it back in again.* But she says this kind of sound subtraction should only be done with visible letters. Doing all the sound manipulations in your head is too taxing for young children, she said.

Brady’s concern is the misunderstanding that teachers need to teach all the phonemes before moving on to phonics. It’s not a precursor or a prerequisite to reading and writing, she says. Instead, sound training should be taught at the same time as new groups of letters are introduced. “The letters reinforce the phoneme awareness and the phoneme awareness reinforces the letters,” said Brady, speaking at a 2022 teacher training session. She said that researchers and teacher trainers need to help educators shift to integrating letters into their early reading instruction. “It’s going to take a while to penetrate the belief system that’s out there,” she said.

I once thought that the reading wars were about whether to teach phonics. But there are fierce debates even among those who support a phonics-heavy science of reading. I’ve come to understand that the research hasn’t yet answered all our questions about the best way to teach all the steps. Schools might be over-teaching phonemic awareness. And children with dyslexia might need more than other children. More importantly, the science of reading is the same as any other scientific inquiry. Every new answer may also raise new questions as we get closer to the truth. 

*Clarification: An earlier version of this story suggested a different example of removing the “r” sound from “first,” but “r” is not an independent phoneme in this word. So a teacher would be unlikely to ask a student to do this particular sound manipulation.

This story about phonemic awareness was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: Controversies within the science of reading appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The stats on school staffing might seem like a violation of the laws of supply and demand.

In the past decade, the population of elementary, middle and high school students in Massachusetts dropped by 42,000 while the number of school employees grew by 18,000. In Connecticut, public school enrollment fell 7 percent while staffing rose 8 percent. Even in states with growing populations, school staff has been increasing far faster than students. Texas, for example, educates 367,000 more students, a 7 percent increase over the past decade, but the number of employees has surged by more than 107,000, a 16 percent jump. Staffing is up 20 percent in Washington state but the number of students has risen by less than 3 percent. 

“When kids go to school right now there are more adults in the building of all types than there were in 2013 and more than when I was a kid,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, where she has been tracking the divergence between students and staff at the nation’s public schools. 

What’s behind the apparent imbalance? Follow the money.

School hiring has taken place in three acts, Roza says. The first act followed the Great Recession of 2008, as schools added back staff that they had been forced to cut in the economic downturn. 

The second act came with seven consecutive years of strong economic growth beginning in 2013. That led to higher state and local tax receipts, which increased school funding and enabled the new hires. “Most of the additions were fueled by a lot of new money,” said Roza. Schools hired more teachers to reduce class sizes. They added art and music teachers, librarians and nurses, as well as special education teachers to help children with disabilities. Schools generally chose to add more slots instead of raising salaries for the teachers they already had, Roza said.

The third act was a pandemic-fueled “hiring bonanza.” Starting in 2020, the federal government sent schools more than $200 billion in pandemic recovery funds. Schools hired additional counselors, interventionists (a fancy name for tutors), and aides, and increased their reserves of substitute teachers. More teachers were hired to further reduce class size, in the hope that students might receive more attention and catch up from pandemic learning losses. By the spring of 2023, school districts had amassed more staff than at any time in history, the Edunomics Lab calculated.

Not every school has increased staffing levels, according to Roza, but she says it’s a widespread national trend. Roza’s organization produced graphs for six states – Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas, Washington and Pennsylvania – that release their staffing and student enrollment data publicly. It could be years before complete national data is available, Roza said. 

The available data doesn’t specify how much of the staff expansion represents new classroom teachers, as opposed to support staff, such as janitors and attendance clerks, or administrators, such as vice principals and math supervisors. 

Roza says there is administrative bloat in the central offices of many school districts. But some of the administrative growth is required to comply with increased federal regulations, such as those that stem from the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA). Other administrators are needed to manage federal grants. Central offices needed more administrators to handle recruitment and human resources because they were hiring for so many new positions. 

Meanwhile, the number of students has been dropping in most school districts. That’s because Americans made fewer babies after the 2008 recession. The national elementary and middle student population, ages five to 13, peaked in 2013 at 37 million; in 2021 there were 400,000 fewer students. (This includes public, private, charter and homeschooled students.) Student population losses are more dramatic in some regions of the country than others; many school districts in the South are still growing.

Roza says some schools have excess capacity and are only half filled. School budgets, often based on per pupil funding formulas, would normally be cut. But many districts have been insulated from financial realities because of pandemic recovery funds.  Schools are expected to face a reckoning after September 2024 when these federal funds expire. Roza predicts many schools will need to lay off four percent or more of their staff, including teachers. 

This news is confusing because school administrators have been complaining about teacher shortages. And indeed, there are unfilled vacancies at many schools. Some of these vacancies reflect new slots that are hard to fill with a finite supply of teachers. But many vacancies are in high poverty schools where fewer teachers want to teach. A year from now, as districts are forced to layoff more teachers, high poverty schools might have even more unfilled positions. And our neediest children will suffer the most. 

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

The post PROOF POINTS: Schools staff up as student enrollment drops appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In early April 2023, I started getting emails and messages urging me to take a look at a fresh reading study in Colorado. The study, a working paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed, came to two dramatic conclusions. The first was that elementary school students who attended “Core Knowledge” schools – which teach young children a broad core curriculum in many subjects – were better readers. Their reading scores in third through sixth grades indicate that these children were not only above average at deciphering the words on the page but were better at understanding and analyzing what they were reading. Even more surprising was the finding that the reading gains were so large for low-income students that they would eliminate the achievement gap between rich and poor children. 

The nine authors, most of whom hail from the University of Virginia, issued a press release trumpeting it as the first long-term study of a knowledge-rich curriculum and the first to show outsized gains on state assessments. They said the gains were large enough to catapult U.S. reading achievement from 15th place among 50 nations on an international reading test of fourth graders to the top five. Robert Pondiscio, writing on the website of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called it “compelling evidence” for the theories of University of Virginia English professor emeritus E.D. Hirsch, who developed the curriculum used in these schools and whose 1987 book Cultural Literacy inspired the common core standards movement in American education. Journalist Natalie Wexler, author of the 2019 book The Knowledge Gap, said the study ought to spark a re-evaluation of the usual approach to reading comprehension in schools, which frequently focuses on skills, such as asking students to find the main idea and make inferences. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum teaches skills too, but it places more emphasis on expanding children’s knowledge of the world, from Greek mythology to the solar system.

For advocates of building children’s general knowledge, the study is certainly positive news and an indication that this type of instruction may be beneficial. But from my perspective, it falls far short of convincing proof or vindication. For starters, the study took place at nine charter schools in Colorado, stretching from Denver to Fort Collins. It’s impossible from the study design to distinguish whether the Core Knowledge curriculum itself made the difference or if it could be attributed to other things that these charter schools were doing, such as teacher training or character education programs.

The schools catered to middle and upper income families; median family income exceeded $114,000 at three of the suburban schools. Only one of the schools had a somewhat lower income population, but median family income still exceeded $50,000 and fewer than a third of the children were living below the poverty line, not nearly as poor as many city schools. The claim of closing the achievement gap is based on only 16 students who attended this one charter school.

Researchers have long found correlations between a child’s knowledge and reading scores, but that’s not the same as proving that building knowledge first is what causes reading comprehension to flourish later. The theory – widely accepted by education researchers –  is that what we grasp from what we read depends on whether we can hook it to concepts and topics that we already have some knowledge about. Laboratory studies have found that children who are familiar with a topic are better able to comprehend a new reading passage on it. In one 1987 experiment, kids who were familiar with baseball were better able to retell a story they had read about a baseball game than children who had stronger reading abilities. 

However, U.S. schools, especially those that serve low-income children, have moved in the opposite direction. Educators have felt pressure to cut time for science, social studies and the arts in order to carve out more time for reading and math, the two subjects that are tested annually by every state and by which schools are judged. During reading class time, many schools emphasize skills over content, asking children to practice comprehension strategies on short reading passages, rather than reading a whole novel. Critics say this has hampered the ability of children to build a strong foundation of background knowledge at school and has impeded their reading comprehension.

“The major factor that’s the cause of achievement differences in low and high income students turns out to be their level of general knowledge,” said David Grissmer, a research professor at the University of Virginia and one of the lead authors of the study. “It’s geography; it’s history; it’s science; it’s cooking; it’s athletics, whatever that broad knowledge is about the world we live in. It comes from lots of different sources, sometimes from families, sometimes communities, sometimes from school. It’s the experiences kids have that build that general knowledge, which really provides the particular advantage that we see for higher income kids. I don’t think it completely accounts for it, but it accounts for more of that difference than I think most of us ever thought.”

It’s nearly impossible to test different instructional approaches in real classrooms. Teachers can teach only one curriculum at a time – often after years of training and practice to implement it correctly – and so it’s not practical to randomly assign some children to learn a different way in the same school. One can study the students at schools that have adopted the Core Knowledge curriculum, but it’s hard to know if the students who attend these schools would have scored just as high in reading if they had been taught the usual way at a traditional public school. 

In this study, the researchers copied a method used by charter school researchers. They identified nine charter schools in Colorado that had adopted Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum. They were popular schools with more applicants than seats and so the schools conducted lotteries to admit students. Researchers tracked students who won kindergarten seats in 2009 and 2010, and monitored their test scores through sixth grade, comparing them with students who also wanted to attend these schools but lost the lottery. The lottery losers attended a variety of other schools, from traditional public schools to private schools to other charter schools. Some postponed starting kindergarten that year. Students who attended one of the Core Knowledge charter schools for at least four years had much higher reading scores than lottery losers who did not attend, and the advantage lasted through at least sixth grade. 

A huge complication in this study was that Colorado families had applied to many schools as part of the state’s school choice system. Half of the approximately 1,000 lottery winners chose not to claim their kindergarten seats and opted to attend other schools. In other words, researchers lost half of their study subjects. We don’t know how these children would have fared had they attended the Core Knowledge schools. The results might have been different. 

In theory, knowledge building and reading achievement ought to be a virtuous circle, where children with greater background knowledge should be able to grasp more of what they are reading, which, in turn, helps them learn more and build more background knowledge and become even better readers. However, in this study, researchers detected the full benefit of the Core Knowledge curriculum immediately in third grade, the first year that children are tested at schools. The advantage for Core Knowledge students did not increase further in fourth, fifth and sixth grades.

More than 600 schools across the United States have adopted all or parts of the Core Knowledge curriculum, according to the Core Knowledge website, and, what we all want to know, is how well it’s working in low-income public schools. As those results come in, it will be a welcome addition to the debate on how to teach reading, which, in my opinion, has been excessively focused on teaching phonics to children in kindergarten and first grades. That’s important, but becoming a good reader, with strong comprehension skills, takes a lot more. What kids need to know may prove to be critical. Of course, it will open up a whole new political debate of what content knowledge kids should be taught, and in our political times, that won’t be easy for communities to sort out. Procedures and strategies are easier. Content is hard.

The study, “A Kindergarten Lottery Evaluation of Core Knowledge Charter Schools: Should Building General Knowledge Have a Central Role in Educational and Social Science Research and Policy?” was funded by the Institute for Education Research (an arm of the U.S. Department of Education), the National Science Foundation and two private foundations. One of them, Arnold Ventures, is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.  

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

The post PROOF POINTS: Inside the latest reading study that’s getting a lot of buzz appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In the fall of 2020, educators at Aspire Public Schools – a network of 36 charter schools in California that are privately run but taxpayer funded – were worried. As with other schools around the country, pandemic era learning wasn’t going smoothly. Many of its 7,000 middle and high schoolers, mostly Hispanic and low-income, were struggling in their studies and course failure rates had spiked. 

Like hundreds of school districts, Aspire purchased an online tutoring service for the spring of 2021 to help these students. Students could log in to the tutoring service, called Paper, whenever they wanted, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and connect with a tutor to help with schoolwork in any subject. There was no video or audio, but students could text chat with a human tutor and work together on a virtual whiteboard and share documents. The tutoring was free to students no matter how much they used it.

The nonprofit charter school network also invited a team of university researchers to study whether the online tutoring service was helping students. The results were disheartening for those who hope that on-demand tutoring might be an effective way to help students catch up. (Researchers agreed not to disclose the name of the tutoring company in the study, but Aspire has been public about its 2021 tutoring deal with the Montreal-based tutoring giant Paper, also known as Paper Education Company Inc..)

The researchers, from Brown University and the University of California, Irvine, tried three different ways of engaging students. But no matter what they tried, a majority of students never used the tutoring service. Even their most successful effort, which involved nudging both parents and students with frequent text messages and emails, convinced only 27 percent of the students to try an online tutor at least once. More than 70 percent of the students never tried it. Without the nudges, only 19 percent of the students connected with an online tutor. And, among the students who needed tutoring the most because they had failed a class with a D or an F in the fall of 2020, only 12 percent ever logged on. Students who were doing well at school and not at risk of failure were twice as likely to take advantage of the free tutoring. 

“Take-up remained low,” the researchers wrote, in an October 2022 working paper of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, titled “The inequity of opt-in educational resources and an intervention to increase equitable access.” 

“The real key takeaway from the study,” said lead researcher Carly Robinson, is that just telling students about a tutoring service isn’t enough to make them use it.  “And it happens even less for those students who we think probably need it the most,” said Robinson, a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute and a researcher at the National Student Support Accelerator, which is promoting the use of evidence-based tutoring at schools.

The students who did log in typically had no more than four tutoring sessions during the entire spring term. Only 26 of the 7,000 students used it three times or more a week, which is what experts are recommending. One student was a power user, logging on 168 times.

It’s unclear how much this optional tutoring helped students academically. Fewer students in the group that used the tutoring the most failed classes. Fifty-nine percent of the students who were nudged (along with their parents) passed all their courses without any Ds or Fs compared to 55 percent of the students who weren’t nudged to use the tutoring. Still, even with the availability of tutoring and the reminders, more than 40 percent of the students failed at least one class. 

Students in the nudged group didn’t get higher grades than students in the control group who were not nudged. In both groups, the students who took advantage of at least one tutoring session did get better grades than those who never had a tutoring session. Math grades, for example, were more than a letter grade higher – an A versus a B minus. But researchers emphasized that’s not proof that the tutoring made the difference. It’s quite likely that students who were motivated to try a tutoring session were generally more motivated students and would have had higher grades regardless. 

Schools are required to spend 20 percent of their $122 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds on helping students catch up academically.  Education researchers and the U.S. Department of Education are calling for schools to set up tutoring programs, especially for the weakest students who fell the most behind during the pandemic. Strong scientific evidence of academic gains has come from a specific type of intensive tutoring that takes place three or more times a week and is often referred to as “high dosage.” Hallmarks of the proven programs are not just frequency, but working in-person with tutors using clear lesson plans, rather than merely helping with homework. And the sessions are scheduled during school hours, when attendance is required. 

“Good tutoring also means working with the same tutor over time and building a relationship, which isn’t usually possible with an on-demand sort of support,” said Amanda Neitzel, assistant professor at the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University and research director for ProvenTutoring, a coalition of organizations that provide evidence-based tutoring programs.

Neitzel advises schools not to spend their pandemic recovery money on 24/7 online tutoring. “I think in most cases, no,” she said.  “There is very little evidence to support this, and plenty of better alternatives.” 

Several online tutoring companies have been marketing their 24/7 tutoring services to schools as “high dosage.” Paper has a webpage devoted to “high dosage” tutoring, correctly explaining the model that researchers are advocating, while presenting online products as “newer, more scalable high-dosage tutoring models.” Business has exploded since the pandemic hit. Paper currently has tutoring contracts with 300 school districts around the country, including Las Vegas, Boston and Atlanta, and statewide deals with Mississippi and Tennessee. 

Paper was also the vendor of the online tutoring services in the California study. The company said that it “fully” agrees with the study’s findings and acknowledges that it needed to improve the usage rates of its tutoring services. Paper says that it has since adopted many changes to boost the number of students who log in. Younger students can now record their voices instead of text chatting, for example. And it says that nominating teachers who can “champion” their product in the district and share best practices has been effective in driving more use. However, Paper declined to disclose what its current usage rates are.

In an interview, Paper’s CEO Philip Cutler described his firm’s on-demand tutoring as an “enhanced” version of “high- dosage” tutoring. Better? Yes, he said, because it can serve more students. 

“You need to show that there’s results,” said Cutler. He said that the kind of intensive tutoring that researchers are recommending is “valuable” but it can serve only  “a handful of students.” “It doesn’t move the needle nationally,” he said.

Research-backed tutoring programs, by contrast, are difficult for schools to manage, from hiring and training tutors to finding classroom space for the tutoring sessions and rescheduling the school day to make time for it.  It’s much easier for school leaders to pay for an online tutoring service that takes place outside the school walls.

Cutler admitted that he cannot yet point to proven results for his on-demand tutoring. He’s currently working with independent researchers at Learn Platform and McGill University to evaluate his product.

At first glance, on-demand online tutoring would seem to be more economical. Cutler said his company charges a flat fee of $40 to $80 per student, depending on the size of the school district, regardless of hours used or how many students log in. By contrast, evidence-based high-dosage tutoring can run $4,000 per student for the year. However, given the low usage seen in the California study, per-hour costs can be similar. (Here’s my back-of-the-envelope math: If a 10,000-student district pays $400,000, but only 20 percent of the students log in for four half-hour sessions each, then the district could end up paying $100 an hour for tutoring.).

One influential educator has some advice for administrators who are trying to figure out what to do. Terry Grier, the former schools superintendent of Houston and a mentor to school leaders around the country, said schools that want to offer on-demand tutoring should negotiate tighter deals and pay only for the hours used and only if student test scores increase. He said it’s  “immoral” for schools to sign “blank contracts” without strings attached. In his own experience with “high-dosage” tutoring in Texas, he said that the in-person, intensive version was very effective, especially in math. He said he also tried online tutoring, but it didn’t work well. “Kids wouldn’t use it,” Grier said.

Online tutoring is still relatively new and these on-demand services may prove to be effective.

Tutoring companies describe impressive vetting processes and training programs for their tutors, who might be fantastic. I don’t know. In the California study, lead researcher Robinson noticed that online tutors could relieve teachers from having to answer every small question that students have so that they can spend time with students who need more help. 

“I think there’s a place for this type of virtual on-demand tutoring,” said Robinson. 

Cutler, Paper’s CEO, told me that some teachers are telling their students to submit their first drafts to a Paper tutor to work with students on revising their essays before turning them in. Using online tutors to build good editing habits sounds like a fantastic idea to me, but it might not help students make up for pandemic learning losses. 

Meanwhile, the Aspire schools in California have reconsidered on-demand tutoring and many aren’t using it anymore. The schools that are have shifted to using the online tutors for special projects and as an additional resource when parents aren’t available for on-the-spot help with homework.

This story about on-demand tutoring was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: Many schools are buying on-demand tutoring but a study finds that few students are using it appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Two Democratic senators urged the Department of Education to strengthen regulations against excluding schoolchildren from class because of behaviors related to a disability – a practice known as informal removal.

Since the pandemic began, parents of kids with disabilities say the practice has been on the rise, denying their kids the legal right to an education. Disability rights advocates and legal experts say the removals likely circumvent federal protections for these children, who are not supposed to be disciplined because of their disability. 

In a report Tuesday, The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report documented the impact of these informal removals on children and families. In interviews with 20 families in 10 states, parents said they were called repeatedly, sometimes less than an hour into the school day, to pick up their children. Some said they left work so frequently they lost their jobs.

If you’ve had experiences with informal removals of children school, we’d like to hear about them:  Tell us about your experiences with informal removals.

The Education Department says it’s seen an increase in informal removal. In May, the department said it intended to strengthen protections for students with disabilities through possible regulatory amendments to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which protects people from being discriminated against based on their disability. 

The department also issued guidance to schools in July on discriminatory practices in discipline for students with disabilities. That guidance expressly defined informal removals as an action taken by school staff in response to a child’s behavior that removes the child for part or all of the school day, or even indefinitely.

In a letter sent Wednesday to the Education Department, Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, both from Illinois, urged that the practice be formally defined in regulation and included as a form of prohibited, discriminatory action during the final rulemaking for Section 504. 

“Informal removals not only restrict children’s personal growth and decrease their likelihood of graduating, but they also are discriminatory,” the letter said. “Federal and state laws and regulations, including Section 504, were intended to eliminate the segregation of students with disabilities.”

Related: When your disability gets you sent home from school

Students are protected by federal law from being repeatedly taken out of the classroom for disability-related behaviors. After 10 suspensions, families of disabled children are entitled to a review of whether the behaviors are a result of the child’s disability. If so, schools are supposed to make adjustments, such as providing additional accommodations or considering a change in placement.

But when the removals are not recorded, those protections are not always triggered, and families may not know they have recourse. The department’s July guidance made clear that students who are informally removed have the same rights as those who are officially suspended, including to the review process. 

In a statement Wednesday, the Department of Education said: “The ‘informal removal’ of students with disabilities is a pernicious and dangerous practice that the Office for Civil Rights has seen arise with increasing frequency. All students have the right to an education free from discrimination.”

The senators noted formal removals, such as documented suspensions and expulsions, lead to a loss of 11 million instructional hours per year. Many schools have promised to cut down on suspensions, since kids can’t learn as well when they aren’t in class.

But because informal removals are not recorded, the full scope of their impact on children remains unquantified. 

“In some cases, informal removals may result in students with disabilities missing months and even years of classroom instruction,” the senators wrote. “Missing school also deprives children of other important services, such as access to free lunch, referrals to outside services, medical care, evaluation services, access to a library and playground, extracurricular activities, and a sense of community and belonging.”

This story was produced by The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. 

The post Senators call for stronger rules to reduce off-the-books suspensions appeared first on The Hechinger Report.