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. 

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Some kids appear to learn faster than others. A few years ago, a group of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University decided to study these rapid learners to see what they are doing differently and if their strategies could help the rest of us.

But as the scientists began their study, they stumbled upon a fundamental problem:  they could not find faster learners. After analyzing the learning rates of 7,000 children and adults using instructional software or playing educational games, the researchers could find no evidence that some students were progressing faster than others. All needed practice to learn something new, and they learned about the same amount from each practice attempt. On average, it was taking both high and low achievers about seven to eight practice exercises to learn a new concept, a rather tiny increment of learning that the researchers call a “knowledge component.”

“Students are starting in different places and ending in different places,” said Ken Koedinger, a cognitive psychologist and director of Carnegie Mellon’s LearnLab, where this research was conducted. “But they’re making progress at the same rates.” 

Koedinger and his team’s data analysis was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, in March 2023. The study offers the hope that “anyone can learn anything they want” if they get well-designed practice exercises and put some effort into it.  Raw talent, like having a “knack for math” or a “gift for language,” isn’t required.

Koedinger and his colleagues wrote that they were initially “surprised” by the “astonishing amount of regularity in students’ learning rate.” The discovery contradicts our everyday experiences. Some students earn As in algebra, an example mentioned in the paper, and they appear to have learned faster than peers who get Cs.

But as the scientists confirmed their numerical results across 27 datasets, they began to understand that we commonly misinterpret prior knowledge for learning. Some kids already know a lot about a subject before a teacher begins a lesson. They may have already had exposure to fractions by making pancakes at home using measuring cups. The fact that they mastered a fractions unit faster than their peers doesn’t mean they learned faster; they had a head start. 

Like watching a marathon

Koedinger likens watching children learn to watching a marathon from the finish line. The first people to cross the finish line aren’t necessarily the fastest when there are staggered starts. A runner who finished sooner might have taken five hours, while another runner who finished later might have taken only four hours. You need to know each runner’s start time to measure the pace.

Koedinger and his colleagues measured each student’s baseline achievement and their incremental gains from that initial mark. This would be very difficult to measure in ordinary classrooms, but with educational software, researchers can sort practice exercises by the knowledge components required to do them, see how many problems students get right initially and track how their accuracy improves over time.  

In the LearnLab datasets, students typically used software after some initial instruction in their classrooms, such as a lesson by a teacher or a college reading assignment. The software guided students through practice problems and exercises. Initially, students in the same classrooms had wildly different accuracy rates on the same concepts. The top quarter of students were getting 75 percent of the questions correct, while the bottom quarter of students were getting only 55 percent correct. It’s a gigantic 20 percentage point difference in the starting lines. 

However, as students progressed through the computerized practice work, there was barely even one percentage point difference in learning rates. The fastest quarter of students improved their accuracy on each concept (or knowledge component) by about 2.6 percentage points after each practice attempt, while the slowest quarter of students improved by about 1.7 percentage points. It took seven to eight attempts for nearly all students to go from 65 percent accuracy, the average starting place, to 80 percent accuracy, which is what the researchers defined as mastery.

The advantage of a head start

The head start for the high achievers matters.  Above average students, who begin above 65 percent accuracy take fewer than four practice attempts to hit the 80 percent threshold. Below average students tend to require more than 13 attempts to hit the same 80 percent threshold. That difference – four versus 13 – can make it seem like students are learning at different paces. But they’re not. Each student, whether high or low, is learning about the same amount from each practice attempt. (The researchers didn’t study children with disabilities, and it’s unknown if their learning rates are different.)

The student data that Koedinger studied comes from educational software that is designed to be interactive and gives students multiple attempts to try things, make mistakes, get feedback and try again. Students learn by doing. Some of the feedback was very basic, like an answer key, alerting students if they got the problem right or wrong. But some of the feedback was sophisticated. Intelligent tutoring systems in math provided hints when students got stuck, offered complete explanations and displayed step-by-step examples. 

The conclusion that everyone’s learning rate is similar might apply only to well-designed versions of computerized learning. Koedinger thinks students probably learn at different paces in the analog world of paper and pencil, without the same guided practice and feedback. When students are learning more independently, he says, some might be better at checking their own work and seeking guidance.  

Struggling students might be getting fewer “opportunities” to learn in the analog world, Koedinger speculated. That doesn’t necessarily mean that schools and parents should be putting low-achieving students on computers more often. Many students quickly lose motivation to learn on screens and need more human interaction.

Memory ability varies

Learning rates were especially steady in math and science – the subjects that most of the educational software in this study focused on. But researchers noticed more divergence in learning rates in the six datasets that involved the teaching of English and other languages. One was a program that taught the use of the article “the,” which can be arbitrary. (Here’s an example: I’m swimming in the Atlantic Ocean today but in Lake Ontario tomorrow. There’s no “the” before lakes.) Another program taught Chinese vocabulary. Both relied on students’ memory and individual memory processing speeds differ. Memory is important in learning math and science too, but Koedinger said students might be able to compensate with other learning strategies, such as pattern recognition, deduction and induction. 

To understand that we all learn at a similar rate is one of the best arguments I’ve seen not to give up on ourselves when we’re failing and falling behind our peers. Koedinger hopes it will inspire teachers to change their attitudes about low achievers in their classrooms, and instead think of them as students who haven’t had the same number of practice opportunities and exposure to ideas that other kids have had. With the right exercises and feedback, and a bit of effort, they can learn too. Perhaps it’s time to revise the old saw about how to get to Carnegie Hall. Instead of practice, practice, practice, I’m going to start saying practice, listen to feedback and practice again (repeat seven times).

This story 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.

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The typical ambitious high school student takes advanced algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus. None of that math may be necessary for the vast majority of undergraduates who don’t intend to major in science or another STEM field. 

But those same students don’t have many of the math skills that professors think they actually do need. In a survey, humanities, arts and social science professors say they really want their students to be able to analyze data, create charts and spreadsheets and reason mathematically – skills that high school math courses often skip or rush through.

“We still need the traditional algebra-to-calculus curriculum for students who are intending a STEM major,” said Gary Martin, a professor of mathematics education at Auburn University in Alabama who led the team that conducted this survey of college professors. “But that’s maybe 20 percent. The other 80 percent, what about them?” 

Martin said that the survey showed that high schools should stress “reasoning and critical thinking skills, decrease the emphasis on specific mathematical topics, and increase the focus on data analysis and statistics.”

This damning assessment of the content of high school math comes from a survey of about 300 Alabama college professors who oversee majors and undergraduate degree programs at both two-year and four-year public colleges in the humanities, arts, social sciences and some natural sciences. Majors that require calculus were excluded. 

The 2021 survey prompted Alabama’s public colleges and universities to allow more students to meet their math requirements by taking a statistics course instead of a traditional math class, such as college algebra or calculus. 

Martin and his colleagues later realized that the survey had implications for high school math too, and presented these results at an Oct. 26, 2023 session of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics annual conference in Washington D.C.  Full survey results are slated to be published in the winter 2024 issue of the MathAMATYC Educator, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges.

In the survey, professors were asked detailed questions about which mathematical concepts and skills students need in their programs. Many high school math topics were unimportant to college professors. For example, most professors said they wanted students to understand functions, particularly linear and exponential functions, which are used to model trends, population changes or compound interest. But Martin said that non-STEM students didn’t really need to learn trigonometric functions, which are used in satellite navigation or mechanical engineering. 

College professors were more keen on an assortment of what was described as mathematical “practices,” including the ability to “interpret quantitative information,” “strategically infer, evaluate and reason,” “apply the mathematics they know to solve everyday life, society and the workplace,” and to “look for patterns and relationships and make generalizations.”

“Teachers are so focused on covering all the topics that they don’t have time to do the practices when the practices are what really matters,” said Martin.

Understanding statistics was high on the list. An overwhelming majority of college professors said students in their programs needed to be familiar with statistics and data analysis, including concepts like correlation, causation and the importance of sample size. They wanted students to be able to “interpret displays of data and statistical analyses to understand the reasonableness of the claims being presented.” Professors say students need to be able to produce bar charts, histograms and line charts. Facility with spreadsheets, such as Excel, is useful too.

“Statistics is what you need,” said Martin. “Yet, in many K-12 classrooms, statistics is the proverbial end-of-the-year unit that you may or may not get to. And if you do, you rush through it, just to say you did it. But there’s not this sense of urgency to get through the statistics, as there is to get through the math topics.”

Though the survey took place only in Alabama and professors in other states might have different thoughts on the math that students need, Martin suspects that there are more similarities than differences.

The mismatch between what students learn in high school and what they need in college isn’t easy to fix. Teachers generally don’t have time for longer statistics units, or the ability to go deeper into math concepts so that students can develop their reasoning skills, because high school math courses have become bloated with too many topics. However, there is no consensus on which algebra topics to jettison.

Encouraging high school students to take statistics classes during their junior and senior years is also fraught. College admissions officers value calculus, almost as a proxy for intelligence. And college admissions tests tend to emphasize math skills that students will practice more on the algebra-to-calculus track. A diversion to data analysis risks putting students at a disadvantage. 

The thorniest problem is that revamping high school math could force students to make big choices in school before they know what they want to study in college. Students who want to enter STEM fields still need calculus and the country needs more people to pursue STEM careers. Taking more students off of the calculus track could close doors to many students and ultimately weaken the U.S. economy.

Martin said it’s also important to remember that vocational training is not the only purpose of math education.  “We don’t have students read Shakespeare because they need it to be effective in whatever they’re going to do later,” he said. “It adds something to your life. I felt that it really gave me breadth as a human being.”  He wants high school students to study some math concepts they will never need because there’s a beauty to them. “Appreciating mathematics is a really intriguing way of looking at the world,” he said.

Martin and his colleagues don’t have any definitive solutions, but their survey is a helpful data point in demonstrating how too few students are getting the mathematical foundations they need for the future. 

This story about high school math 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.

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Much attention in the post-pandemic era has been on what students have lost – days of school, psychological health, knowledge and skills. But now we have evidence that they may also have gained something: schools that address more of their needs. A majority of public schools have begun providing services that are far afield from traditional academics, including healthcare, housing assistance, childcare and food aid. 

In a Department of Education survey released in October 2023 of more than 1,300 public schools, 60 percent said they were partnering with community organizations to provide non-educational services. That’s up from 45 percent a year earlier in 2022, the first time the department surveyed schools about their involvement in these services. They include access to medical, dental, and mental health providers as well as social workers. Adult education is also often part of the package; the extras are not just for kids. 

“It is a shift,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, where she tracks school spending. “We’ve seen partnering with the YMCA and with health groups for medical services and psychological evaluations.”

Deeper involvement in the community started as an emergency response to the coronavirus pandemic. As schools shuttered their classrooms, many became hubs where families obtained food or internet access. Months later, many schools opened their doors to become vaccine centers. 

New community alliances were further fueled by more than $200 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds that have flowed to schools. “Schools have a lot of money now and they’re trying to spend it down,” said Roza. Federal regulations encourage schools to spend recovery funds on nonprofit community services, and unspent funds will eventually be forfeited.

The term “community school” generally refers to schools that provide a cluster of wraparound services under one roof. The hope is that students living in poverty will learn more if their basic needs are met. Schools that provide only one or two services are likely among the 60 percent of schools that said they were using a community school or wraparound services model, but they aren’t necessarily full-fledged community schools, Department of Education officials said.

The wording of the question on the federal School Pulse Panel survey administered in August 2023 allowed for a broad interpretation of what it means to be a community school. The question posed to a sample of schools across all 50 states was this: “Does your school use a “community school” or “wraparound services” model? A community school or wraparound services model is when a school partners with other government agencies and/or local nonprofits to support and engage with the local community (e.g., providing mental and physical health care, nutrition, housing assistance, etc.).” 

The most common service provided was mental health (66 percent of schools) followed by food assistance (55 percent). Less common were medical clinics and adult education, but many more schools said they were providing these services than in the past.

The number of full-fledged community schools is also believed to be growing, according to education officials and researchers. Federal funding for community schools tripled during the pandemic to $75 million in 2021-22 from $25 million in 2019-20. According to the  education department, the federal community schools program now serves more than 700,000 students in about 250 school districts, but there are additional state and private funding sources too. 

Whether it’s a good idea for most schools to expand their mission and adopt aspects of the community school model depends on one’s view of the purpose of school. Some argue that schools are taking on too many functions and should not attempt to create outposts for outside services. Others argue that strong community engagement is an important aspect of education and can improve daily attendance and learning. Research studies conducted before the pandemic have found that academic benefits from full-fledged community schools can take several years to materialize. It’s a big investment without an instant payoff.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether schools will continue to embrace their expanded mission after federal pandemic funds expire in March 2026. That’s when the last payments to contractors and outside organizations for services rendered can be made. Contracts must be signed by September 2024.

Edunomics’s Roza thinks many of these community services will be the first to go as schools face future budget cuts. But she also predicts that some will endure as schools raise money from state governments and philanthropies to continue popular programs.

If that happens, it will be an example of another unexpected consequence of the pandemic. Even as pundits decry how the pandemic has eroded support for public education, it may have profoundly transformed the role of schools and made them even more vital.

This story about wraparound services 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.

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Young students around the world struggle to memorize multiplication tables, but the effort pays off. Cognitive scientists say that learning 6 x 7 and 8 x 9 by heart frees up the brain’s working memory so that students can focus on the more demanding aspects of problem solving. 

Math teachers debate the best way to make multiplication automatic. Some educators argue against drills and say fluency will develop with everyday usage. Others insist that schools should devote time to helping children memorize times tables. 

Even among proponents of memorization, it’s unclear which methods are the most effective. Should kids draw their own color-coded tables and study them, or copy their multiplication facts out dozens of times? Should they play multiplication songs and videos? Should they learn mnemonic tricks, like how the digits of the multiples of nine add up to nine (1+8, 2+7, 3+6, etc.)?  My daughter’s gym teacher used to make students shout “7 x 5 is 35” and “6 x 8 is 48” as they did jumping jacks. (It was certainly a way to make jumping less monotonous.) 

To help advise teachers, a team of learning scientists compared two common methods: chanting and flashcards. 

The 2022 experiment took place in four second grade classrooms in the Netherlands. The teachers began by delivering a lesson on multiplying by three. Using the same scripted lesson, they explained multiplication concepts, such as: “If I grab three apples, and I do this only one time, how many apples do I have?” 

After the lesson, half the classrooms practiced by reciting equations displayed on a whiteboard:  “One times three is three, two times three is six…” through to 10. The other half practiced with flashcards. Students had their own personal sets with answers on the reverse side. Both groups spent five minutes practicing three times during the week for a total of 15 minutes. (More details on the experiment’s design here.)

When the teachers moved on to multiplication by fours, the groups switched. The chanters quizzed themselves with flashcards, and the flashcard kids started chanting. All the students practiced memorizing both ways. 

The results added up to a clear winner. 

On a pre-test before the lesson, the second graders got an average of three math facts right. Afterwards, the chanters tended to double their accuracy, answering six facts correctly. But the flashcard users averaged eight correct. Students were tested again a full week later without any additional practice sessions, and the strong advantage for flashcard users didn’t fade. It was a sign that flashcard practice not only produces better short-term memories, but also better long-term ones –  the ultimate goal.

The study, “The effect of retrieval practice on fluently retrieving multiplication facts in an authentic elementary school setting,” was published online in October 2023 in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.  Though a small study of 48 students, this classroom experiment is a good example of the power of what cognitive scientists call “spaced retrieval practice,” in which the act of remembering consolidates information and helps the brain form long-term memories.  

Retrieval practice can seem counterintuitive. One might think that students should study before being assessed or quizzing themselves. But there’s a growing body of evidence that trying to recall something is itself a powerful tool for learning, particularly when you are given the correct answer immediately after making a stab at it and then get a chance to try again. Testing your memory – even when you draw a blank – is a way to build new memories. 

Many experiments have shown that retrieval practice produces better long-term memories than studying. Flashcards are one way to try retrieval practice. Quizzes are another option because they also require students to retrieve new information from memory. Indeed, many teachers opt for speed drills, asking students to race through a page of multiplication problems in a minute. 

Flashcards can be less anxiety provoking, provide students immediate feedback with answers on the reverse side and allow students to repeat the retrieval practice immediately, running through the deck more than once. Still, kids are kids and they easily drift off task during independent practice time. With a timed quiz, the teacher can be more confident that everyone has benefited from a round of retrieval practice. I’d be curious to see flashcards and quizzes pitted against each other in a future classroom experiment. 

As charming as multiplication songs are – I have a soft spot for School House Rock and my editor fondly recalls her Billy Leach multiplication records – they are unlikely to be as effective as flashcards because they don’t involve retrieval practice, according to Gino Camp, a professor of learning sciences at Open University in the Netherlands and one of the researchers on the study.

That doesn’t mean we should jettison the songs or all the other memorization methods just because some aren’t as effective as others. Researchers may eventually find that a combination of techniques is even more powerful. Still, there are limited minutes in the school day, and knowing which learning methods are the most effective can help everyone – teachers, parents and students – use their time wisely.

This story about multiplication flashcards 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.

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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.

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Kids around the country are still suffering academically from the pandemic. But more than three years after schools shut down, it’s hard to understand exactly how much ground students have lost and which children now need the most attention.

Three new reports offer some insights.  All three were produced by for-profit companies that sell assessments to schools. Unlike annual state tests, these interim assessments are administered at least twice a year and help track student progress, or learning, during the year. These companies may have a business motive in sounding an alarm to sell more of their product, but the reports are produced by well-regarded education statisticians.

The big picture is that kids at every grade are still behind where they would have been without the pandemic. All three reports look at student achievement in the spring of 2019, before the pandemic, and compare it to the spring of 2023. A typical sixth grader, for example, in the spring of 2023 was generally scoring much lower than a typical sixth grader in 2019.

The differences are in the details. One report says that students are still behind the equivalent of four to five months of school, but another says it’s one to three months. A third doesn’t measure months of lost learning, but notices the alarming 50 percent increase in the number of students who are still performing significantly below grade level.

Depending on how you slice and dice the data, older students in middle school and beyond seem to be in the most precarious position and younger children seem to be more resilient and recovering better. Yet, under a different spotlight, you can see troubling signs even among younger children. This includes the very youngest children who weren’t school age when the pandemic hit.

The most recent data, released on Aug. 28, 2023, is from Curriculum Associates, which sells i-Ready assessments taken by more than 11 million students across the country and focuses on “grade-level” skills.*  It counts the number of students in third grade, for example, who are able to read at a third-grade level or solve math problems that a third grader ought to be able to solve. The standards for what is grade-level achievement are similar to what most states consider to be “proficient” on their annual assessments.

The report concludes that the percentage of students who met grade-level expectations was “flat” over the past school year. This is one way of noting that there wasn’t much of an academic recovery between spring of 2022 and spring of 2023. Students of every age, on average, lagged behind where students had been in 2019.

For example, 69 percent of fourth graders were demonstrating grade-level skills in math in 2019. That dropped to 55 percent in 2022 and barely improved to 56 percent in 2023. (The drop in grade-level performance isn’t as dramatic for seventh and eighth graders, in part, because so few students were meeting grade-level expectations even before the pandemic.)

“It’s dang hard to catch up,” said Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates.

To make up for lost ground, students would have to learn more in a year than they typically do. That generally didn’t happen. Huff said this kind of extra learning is especially hard for students who missed foundational math and reading skills during the pandemic.

While most students learned at a typical pace during the 2022-23 school year, Curriculum Associates noted a starkly different and troubling pattern for children who are significantly below grade level by two or more years. Their numbers spiked during the pandemic and have not gone down. Even worse, these children learned less during the 2022-23 school year than during a typical pre-pandemic year. That means they are continuing to lose ground.

Huff highlighted three groups of children who need extra attention: poor readers in second, third and fourth grades; children in kindergarten and first grade, and middle school math students.

There’s been a stubborn 50 percent increase in the number of third and fourth graders who are two or more grade levels behind in reading, Huff said. For example, 19 percent of third graders were that far behind grade level in 2023, up from 12 percent in 2019.  “I find this alarming news,” said Huff, noting that these children were in kindergarten and first grade when the pandemic first hit. “They’re missing out on phonics and phonemic awareness and now they’re thrust into grades three and four,” she said. “If you’re two or more grade levels below in grade three, you’re in big trouble. You’re in big, big, big trouble. We’re going to be seeing evidence of this for years to come.”

The youngest students, who were just two to four years old at the start of the pandemic, are also behind. Huff said that kindergarteners and first graders started the 2022-23 school year at lower achievement levels than in the past. They may have missed out on social interactions and pre-school. “You can’t say my current kindergartener wasn’t in school during the pandemic so they weren’t affected,” said Huff.

Math achievement slipped the most after schools shuttered and switched to remote learning. And now very high percentages of middle schoolers are below grade level in the subject. Huff speculates that they missed out on foundational math skills, especially fractions and proportional reasoning.

Renaissance administered its Star tests to more than six million students around the country. Its spring 2023 report was released on Aug, 9. Like Curriculum Associates, Renaissance finds that, “growth is back, but performance is not,” according to Gene Kerns, Renaissance’s chief academic officer.** That means students are generally learning at a typical pace at school, but not making up for lost ground. Depending on the subject and the grade, students still need to recover between one and three months of instruction.

Math is rebounding better than reading. “Math went down an alarming amount, but has started to go back up,” Kerns said. “We’ve not seen much rebound to reading.” Reading achievement, however, wasn’t as harmed by school disruptions. 

Kerns generally sees a sunnier story for younger children and a more troubling picture for older students.

The youngest children in kindergarten and first grade are on par with pre-pandemic history, he said. Middle elementary school grades are a little behind but catching up. 

“The older the student, the more lingering the impact,” said Kerns. “The high school data is very alarming. If you’re a junior in high school, you only have one more year. There’s a time clock on this.” 

Seventh and eighth graders showed tiny decreases in annual learning in math and reading. Kerns says he’s “hesitant” to call it a “downward spiral.”

The third report come from NWEA, which administers the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Assessment to more than 6 million students. Its spring 2023 data, released on July 11, showed that students on average need four to five months of extra schooling, on top of the regular school year, to catch up. This graph below, is a good summary of how much students are behind as expressed in months of learning.

Spring 2023 achievement gaps and months of schooling required to catch up to pre-COVID achievement levels

Like the Renaissance report, the NWEA report shows a bigger learning loss in math than in reading, and indicates that older students have been more academically harmed by the pandemic. They’ll need more months of extra schooling to catch up to where they would have been had the pandemic never happened. It could take years and years to squeeze these extra months of instruction in and many students may never receive them.

From my perspective, Renaissance and NWEA came to similar conclusions for most students. The main difference is that Renaissance has additional assessment data for younger children in kindergarten through second grade, showing a recovery, and high school data, showing a worse deterioration. The discrepancies in their measurement of months of learning loss, whether it’s four to five months or one to three months, is inconsequential. Both companies admit these assumption-filled estimates are imprecise.

One of the most substantial differences among the reports is that Curriculum Associates is sounding an alarm bell for kindergarteners and first graders while Renaissance is not.

The three reports all conclude that kids are behind where they would have been without the pandemic. But some sub-groups are doing much worse than others. The students who are the most behind and continuing to spiral downward really need our attention. Without extra support, their pandemic slump could be lifelong. 

* Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that more than 3 million students took i-Ready assessments.

** Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Gene Kerns’s last name.

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

The post PROOF POINTS: Three views of pandemic learning loss and recovery appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Social-emotional learning – aimed at fostering a wide assortment of soft skills from empathy and listening to anger management and goal-setting – has been one of the hottest trends in education over the past decade, and more recently, a new flashpoint in the culture wars. Moms for Liberty, a conservative group, advises parents to oppose it, while advocates on the left say it should include such topics as social justice and anti-racism training. 

Alongside the politics, there’s a genuine debate over whether these programs – often abbreviated as SEL and sold to thousands of schools around the country – actually help students. 

For years, advocates have claimed that research evidence supports social-emotional learning, citing hundreds of studies that find SEL instruction improves both academic achievement and student well-being. One of the most influential papers is a 2011 meta-analysis that reviewed more than 200 studies on SEL programs in schools and concluded that academic performance jumped 11 percentile points. That study has been cited more than 11,000 times, according to Google Scholar. But that research is old, including studies conducted only through 2007. 

An updated meta-analysis was published in July 2023 in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development. It was conducted by 14 researchers, the majority from Yale University, and it also found good results for SEL interventions in schools while simultaneously broadening the category of “social and emotional learning” to encompass even more non-academic skills. However, this latest research synthesis doesn’t really settle the debate over whether the evidence for SEL is strong or guide schools to which SEL interventions are most effective.  

The new meta-analysis reviewed a fresher batch of 424 studies conducted between 2008 and 2020 across more than 50 countries and involving more than 500,000 students in kindergarten through grade 12. The studies took place in schools, as opposed to research laboratories, and compared what happened to students who received the lessons to those who didn’t. All the SEL programs in the paper lasted for at least six sessions or four months. Single workshops were excluded. Sometimes students learned about social and emotional skills during a once-a-week advisory session for a year. The lessons ranged from five minutes to two hours.

There was also a huge variety in the kinds of soft skills taught during these lessons. Some programs focused narrowly on discrete skills such as mindfulness or emotional intelligence. Others touched upon the full gamut of social-emotional skills, from interpersonal relations to self improvement. Also included were programs that addressed ethical and civic values. Sex education programs or interventions that primarily addressed drug use or obesity were excluded. 

All of these SEL variations were stirred together into a big stew, and the researchers calculated that, on average, students who received them were generally better off than students who didn’t get the training as measured by improved social skills, attitudes, behaviors, relationships and academic achievement. It was almost an unending laundry list of positives, including a decrease in bullying, stress, suicides and depression. The largest improvement was in school climate; students who had participated in SEL programs felt that their schools were much safer and students were more respected. For some studies, there was longer term follow-up data and even six months after a program ended, students were still benefiting from their SEL lessons.

Only three out of 12 outcome categories did not show improvements from SEL programs, including disciplinary incidents, physical health and family relationships. The failure to see a reduction in suspensions was surprising and confusing given that the researchers found improvements in student behavior. 

A concern with this meta-analysis, like much of the research in the field, is that it was conducted by SEL proponents. The lead author of the meta-analysis, Christina Cipriano, a psychologist at the Yale Child Study Center, is a prominent researcher in the field of social-emotional learning. She is the director of the Education Collaboratory at Yale, whose mission is to “advance the science and practice of social and emotional learning (SEL).”

In an interview, Cipriano said she made every effort to collect all studies on SEL, including negative ones that hadn’t been published in journals, and that all of the data is publicly available for other researchers to scrutinize.

Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, testified before Congress that research claims about SEL have been “oversold.” He says many of the studies included in large meta-analyses like these are of low quality that would not meet the threshold for rigorous evidence by outside organizations, such as RAND or the Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse. 

It’s quite likely that many of the studies included in this 2023 meta-analysis might be thrown out by outside researchers, and it’s unclear whether the overall results would still be so positive. 

Another problem for the field is that it’s very hard to measure a child’s emotions or friendship skills and sometimes researchers create their own surveys to capture how much a student’s well-being has improved. And when researchers make their own yardsticks, studies may be more likely to find that an intervention was successful.

“It’s quite obvious that when you teach kids that they are supposed to respond in certain ways to certain phrases, that they’ll be more likely to respond in those certain ways than students who haven’t been trained that way,” said Eden, in an interview conducted via email. “Whether any of this actually captures anything of a child’s internal/emotional state may be doubted.” 

On the other hand, more objective outcomes like grades and test scores also improved, according to the meta-analysis. And even though school climate surveys are somewhat subjective, researchers have found them to be reliable.

Amid the confusion over how we should measure the effectiveness of SEL programs is a political backstory, which explains why there is so much more criticism and scrutiny of the research.

Social-emotional learning enjoyed widespread bipartisan support more than a decade ago. Explicitly teaching non-cognitive skills to children, especially in low-income communities, appealed to many educators and policymakers. Some of these skills, like learning to share and take turns, had long been part of what teachers have always taught in preschool and kindergarten.  

Much of the drive to teach older children soft skills began in urban charter schools, which were were finding success with what is often called character building, teaching kids how to be responsible and resilient. Journalist Paul Tough popularized the ideas for social-emotional learning in his 2012 best seller, “How Children Succeed,” and the programs spread nationally. 

A backlash followed. Critics on the left questioned why white psychologists were trying to “fix” Black and brown children with these lessons instead of overhauling racist systems that prevented all children from succeeding. 

Many in the SEL field took the criticisms to heart. And as the Black Lives Matter movement gathered steam, SEL programs expanded into social justice and anti-racism training, encouraging students to create a better world. According to the 2023 meta-analysis, about half the SEL programs focused on “values,” 30 percent  on “perspectives,” and 34 percent  on “identity.” 

Critics also began to question whether some SEL programs force teachers, who aren’t generally trained in counseling, to be therapists. (Nonetheless, one of the interesting conclusions of the 2023 meta-analysis was that teachers were the most effective instructors of SEL lessons. When these lessons were led by school counselors or outsiders, they didn’t work as well.)

It’s easy to see how both sides have hijacked what was once a simpler idea of teaching kids to share and respect each other. Conservative groups like Moms for Liberty may exaggerate  the content of typical SEL programs, while advocates on the left seek to expand SEL into political action. 

Meanwhile, a big SEL industry is selling programs to schools. In their sales pitches, they’re quick to cite research and I expect this 2023 meta-analysis will be used to back this claim. But all research isn’t equal and many vendors haven’t put their SEL programs to a rigorous scientific test. There’s certainly a lot of snake oil out there. Schools need more help figuring out which programs are worthwhile. In the meantime, buyer beware.

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

The post PROOF POINTS: A research update on social-emotional learning in schools appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

How does a revolution start? Sometimes, it’s a simple question. For Sarah Powell, an associate professor of special education at the University of Texas at Austin, the question was this math problem: Donna and Natasha folded 96 paper cranes. Donna folded 25 paper cranes. How many did Natasha fold?

In a study, Powell posed that question to children at the end of third grade, when they should have been able to answer it easily. Instead, most couldn’t solve it. One underlined 11 words in the question but didn’t attempt any math. Another jotted down the number 96 and gave up. A few wrote down random numbers that had nothing to do with the problem. More than half the students added the numbers 96 and 25 together. Only two children out of 15 she showed me got the correct answer: 96-25=71.

“I could send you hundreds of these,” Powell said. “It’s heartbreaking. How did we let it get to this? These are kids that just get passed from one grade level to the next. You shouldn’t let a kid get to fourth grade if they can’t add 12 plus 13. I see it as a huge equity issue. It is totally unfair what we are doing to these kids.” 

In early 2020, at an academic conference just before the pandemic hit, Powell commiserated with other experts in special education and students who struggle in math. They shared her frustrations about the state of math education in America. A majority of students weren’t mastering the subject, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a test that tracks academic achievement. The most recent test had shown that 60 percent of fourth graders and 67 percent of eighth graders failed to score at or above the proficient level for their grade.

The researchers begrudged the lack of attention math gets in schools compared to reading, but suddenly their rival discipline – reading – was providing a role model for action. At the time, the debate over why schools ignored the science of reading dominated education news. Parents and teachers were pressuring schools to switch to a phonics heavy curriculum in kindergarten and first grade. “We have a science of math just like there is a science of reading,” said Powell. “They are analogous. We just need to get people going.”

The special education community was also instrumental in drawing the public’s attention to the science of reading. In that case, it was parents of children with dyslexia who were clamoring for change in how schools taught reading. This time, in math, special education researchers are taking the lead.

In its most extreme version, this new math movement revives an old fight between advocates of teacher-led instruction of step-by-step procedures against those who favor student discovery and a conceptual understanding of math. It also raises new questions about what makes for good evidence in math education and pits well-designed quantitative studies of achievement gains against qualitative studies of people’s attitudes about math and why more women and people of color don’t enter STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. 

At the urging of her colleagues, Powell emerged as a founder of the nascent movement. In December 2020, she invited dozens of like-minded education researchers to the first science of math Zoom meeting. They believed the research showed that teaching math properly in the early grades would drastically cut the number of children struggling with the subject who might need special interventions to catch up. 

The researchers continued to meet almost every month during 2021 as their campaign gained momentum. They launched a website, an advocacy group and an auxiliary group for teachers. A Science of Math Facebook group, which they started in December 2020, now has more than 21,000 members. More than 150 education professionals, ranging from teachers to education professors, have added their names to a public list of supporters. One of their leaders held a Science of Math event in Pennsylvania in 2022 and is planning another in 2023.

Their first public assault on the status quo came in August 2022, when Powell and two of her science of math collaborators – Elizabeth Hughes of Penn State and Corey Peltier at the University of Oklahoma – published a paper titled Myths that Undermine Math Teaching. They took direct aim at some of the teaching practices recommended by the influential National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and Jo Boaler, a controversial professor of math education at Stanford University who has a large and devoted following of math teachers.

Citing 115 research studies to back up their views, Powell and her co-authors attacked what they described as common misconceptions about teaching math. They said it’s not essential to make sure children understand mathematical concepts before they are taught calculations. They insisted that algorithms, efficient ways of solving problems quickly, such as long division, aren’t harmful. They said that inquiry-based learning, where teachers encourage students to discover answers for themselves, is often not the best way to teach while explicit, direct instruction usually is. Forcing students to struggle with problems that they not only don’t know how to solve, but also haven’t mastered the tools needed to do so, isn’t helpful. Timed tests? It’s important, the researchers said, for students to master their sums and multiplication tables in order to free up the brain’s working memory to learn more complicated concepts. Periodic timed tests help teachers measure whether students are building speed and accuracy.

Powell says she and 13 other organizers have been volunteering their time to the cause and their group hasn’t taken any money from outside organizations or foundations. Powell’s own research is primarily funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation.

The group is not arguing for a return to old-fashioned rote instruction, Powell says. She’s an advocate of active hands-on learning with tactile objects, what educators call “manipulatives.” But she says that research shows that children learn best when new topics begin with direct explanations from teachers who teach procedures and formulas alongside concepts. Then students practice mastering them. She isn’t opposed to inquiry learning, but she says it’s very hard to teach this way and the appropriate time is after children have mastered multiple strategies and have the tools to think through different possibilities. 

The pushback has already begun. In an interview, Stanford’s Boaler says the myths article is wrong because Powell and her colleagues “cherry picked” the research and “dangerous” because it will lead teachers in the wrong direction. And she questions why special education experts should determine what constitutes the science of math. She points out that there are no mathematics experts in Powell’s group. 

In January 2023, the NCTM, the math teachers group, reiterated its opposition to the rote memorization of math facts, such as multiplication tables. But that group’s president, Kevin Dykema, said the timing was a “fluke” and not in response to the science of math movement. Still, Dykema said he was “concerned” about the group and their disregard of rival research that shows kids are turned off by math when it’s taught as a boring set of procedures. 

“I worry that the science of math is so focused on rote memorization,” said Dykema, a middle school math teacher. “I know a lot of students see math as very meaningless. They think that math is a bunch of isolated skills that need to be memorized, and they don’t see any value in learning it.” A session on the science of math debate is currently being planned for the annual meeting of the NCTM in October 2023.

Behind the scenes, officials at state education agencies and education trade associations from Colorado to North Carolina are asking questions. Powell said she’s already received a positive response from the Kansas State Department of Education. Meanwhile, opponents are privately circulating drafts of rebuttals to the “myths” paper. The homepage of the North Carolina chapter of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators says that the organization is working to understand the research behind the science of math movement and how to respond. “More information is coming soon!” the site promises.

Jon Star, a prominent professor of math education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, says that the science of math isn’t as clear as the science of reading and that there’s much we still don’t understand about the best ways to teach the subject. He also points out that we really don’t know that much about how math is taught around the country. Although Powell’s paper discusses the shortcomings of progressive ideas about emphasizing conceptual math and not drilling math facts, it’s unclear if that’s what’s actually going on in classrooms and whether those practices are to blame for poor math performance. 

It seems clear that we may be heading for a new battle in the math wars, which have been raging on and off in American schools for decades. And that makes one veteran of these battles weary. 

“I go into this with some ennui,” said Deborah Loewenberg Ball of the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, another prominent professor of math education. “But this is a very important conversation to me.” She said that in order to come up with the most effective approach for teaching math, we need to agree on the goals of math instruction. Do we want kids to be able to compute accurately? Yes, but not everyone agrees that this should be the main goal of mathematics education. “The public needs to understand that the goals of math education are contested,” she said. Merely invoking the word “science” doesn’t resolve that debate, Ball said.  

I’m fascinated with this science of math group and what it has to say. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be digging into the research on math instruction and what newer studies tell us about these old debates on procedures, concepts, multiplication tables, how to cultivate number sense, add fractions and solve word problems. I’m eager to see how it all adds up.

This story about the science of math 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: How a debate over the science of math could reignite the math wars 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.

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