Students need help catching up. Tennessee tries tutoring.
| Elizabethton, Tenn.
The stakes are high for educators tasked with catching students up from disruptions brought on by the pandemic. Finding a way forward will prove important to keeping children on track for everything from learning to read to reaching graduation.
Tennessee is addressing the problem with a tool it says has proven results: tutoring. In the northeastern part of the state, East Side Elementary School students are showing progress after the launch of the state’s program last fall. Those being tutored had an average of 14% growth between their first benchmark assessment in September and their second assessment in December, compared with 6% growth for students not participating in the program.
Why We Wrote This
How should schools mitigate the pandemic’s effect on learning? Tennessee is among the first states to launch a tutoring program – with promising results.
At least 18 states and the District of Columbia plan to, or have started, statewide tutoring programs, according to a legislative tracker from the National Student Support Accelerator, an initiative that shares tutoring resources with educators.
In Tennessee, East Side’s teachers are seeing the headway – and appreciating the support. “Considering what we have on our plates, not only dealing academically with trying to play catch-up, but with social [behavior] as well, it’s been nice to have these [tutoring] groups,” says fifth grade teacher April Pearson.
Sarah Cox, a fifth grade student in northeastern Tennessee, knows precisely what she likes best about school: seeing her friends, math class, and recess. This year, there’s a new routine creeping up on her list of favorites: small group tutoring.
“I’ve set a lot of goals, like learning how to be better at grammar,” says Sarah after a tutoring session on thesis statements. “I’ve never been good at it, so it’s definitely something I want to achieve because of better job opportunities.”
East Side Elementary School, where Sarah attends, sits next to the rolling Appalachian Mountains in Elizabethton, Tennessee. The school is an early adopter of a “high-dosage, low-ratio” statewide tutoring program, where students meet in small groups for several intensive sessions per week.
Why We Wrote This
How should schools mitigate the pandemic’s effect on learning? Tennessee is among the first states to launch a tutoring program – with promising results.
The stakes are high, in Tennessee and nationally, for educators tasked with catching students up from once-in-a-century learning interruptions, including initial pandemic shutdowns and reports of ongoing high student and staff absenteeism in many districts. Finding a way forward will prove important to keeping children on track for everything from learning to read to reaching graduation.
Nationally, based on assessments, K-12 students are still three months behind in reading and four months behind in math, according to a December 2021 report by McKinsey & Company. Tennessee state tests in spring 2021 resulted in 4% more students scoring below proficiency on state standards compared with 2019, the last year assessments occurred.
Tutoring, like that in Sarah’s school, is presented as a potential solution by education researchers, who point to multiple studies confirming the effectiveness of intensive tutoring. This type of help can result in learning gains equal to three to 15 extra months of schooling, according to Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Brown University.
“There have been more studies of tutoring programs than almost any other kind of intervention, and they’ve consistently shown large effects for students if done well,” says Dr. Loeb, who also directs the National Student Support Accelerator, an initiative started at Brown’s Annenberg Institute in 2020 to share resources like toolkits with educators trying to start tutoring programs.
Tennessee is one of the first states to establish a statewide tutoring program, launching Tennessee Accelerating Literacy and Learning Corps (TN ALL Corps) in September 2021, with 79 of the state’s 147 school districts signed up to participate. The state provides matching grants to districts for three years, using federal COVID-19 relief funding, and projects the program will reach 150,000 students, which is about 15% of the overall student population.
Other states and districts are also prioritizing tutoring efforts. At least 18 states and the District of Columbia plan to, or have started, a variety of statewide tutoring programs, according to a legislative tracker from the National Student Support Accelerator.
The evidence that tutoring is successful appealed to Penny Schwinn, the Tennessee commissioner of education. “We were looking at what are the best strategies for accelerating achievement, especially coming out of the pandemic, and what we saw is that the most proven strategy for accelerating and maintaining achievement was this high-dosage, low-ratio tutoring,” says Dr. Schwinn.
Obstacles include staffing, especially in urban and rural areas, and determining how to fit tutoring into the school day, or before or after school, says Dr. Schwinn.
“An extra set of hands”
Inside the hallways of East Side Elementary School, pictures of famous Americans and a global map with cutout letters proclaiming “We are going to change the world” dot the walls. The school, part of a city of about 14,500 people, is in an area known for abundant fishing and award-winning barbecue.
In the school cafeteria on a frosty morning in January, three tutors gather with a handful of first grade students identified by staff as kids who are on the bubble of meeting proficiency standards in literacy.
Emily Rock, a former physical education teacher who recently went back to school to earn her elementary teaching certificate, works with three boys at a long table at the back of the room. She reviews double final consonants, where the last two letters of a word form one sound, as in ball and class.
“Do we say ba-l-l?” she asks her students, repeating the final ‘l’ in the word twice. “No, that would be silly,” she exclaims as the children shake their heads. The group practices blending, or sounding out the word, by tapping the syllables on their arms.
Ms. Rock and two other staff members – paraprofessionals who formerly served as teaching assistants in the Elizabethton school district – work full time at East Side Elementary tutoring 90 students in first through fifth grade. They’re hired through TN ALL Corps for three years.
East Side qualifies for federal Title I funding because at least 40% of their students are low income, according to principal Travis Hurley. Nearly 23% of local residents live below the poverty line.
Student achievement dipped during the pandemic, Mr. Hurley says. In the latest statewide tests, 34.6% of students at East Side scored as “on track” or “mastered” for English language arts standards, as compared to 41.8% in 2019.
When administrators in Elizabethton City Schools found out they could offer TN ALL Corps tutoring during the school day, they quickly agreed, and hired tutors to start in the fall of 2021. Although finding tutors is challenging for some Tennessee districts, Elizabethton benefits from proximity to two universities with teacher training programs. East Side pays $800 per student for the tutoring program, with a $700 grant per student from the state making up the $1,500 needed per child.
The tutoring program through TN ALL Corps is showing early promise. At East Side Elementary, students in the program had an average of 14% growth between their first benchmark assessment in September and their second assessment in December, compared with 6% growth for students not participating in the tutoring, according to the district. The Tennessee Department of Education has not yet released statewide data for TN ALL Corps.
April Pearson, a fifth grade teacher at East Side, sees the positive effects in her classroom, through progress on student test scores and grades. “Every educator in the world would love to have an extra set of hands in the classroom,” she says. “Considering what we have on our plates, not only dealing academically with trying to play catch-up, but with social [behavior] as well, it’s been nice to have these [tutoring] groups.”
Across the state in Dyersburg City Schools, a small northwestern Tennessee district of about 2,600 students, the number of first and second graders on track or mastering the district’s early literacy assessment doubled from the start of this school year to January 2022, after starting the TN ALL Corps tutoring program, according to district staff.
“We’ve seen that small group tutoring, especially at the primary school, which is where our students learn to read, has had a great impact on our students,” says Kim Worley, director of schools at Dyersburg City Schools. The district will likely maintain tutoring in the future for at least the youngest students, she says.
A solution in progress
Researchers are quick to caution that not all tutoring leads to equally strong results. For instance, during the No Child Left Behind era, federal funding was provided for tutoring, but they were largely voluntary programs held after school and few students participated.
“Sometimes people hear tutoring and think it’s a 24-hour homework help line. ... But the best kind of tutoring isn’t that kind of opt-in,” says Dr. Loeb, who considers in-school tutoring more equitable than private or free after-school tutoring.
Tutoring programs also face learning struggles that existed pre-pandemic. Even prior to COVID-19, only a third of Tennessee third graders were proficient in English language arts, according to the state department of education. Dr. Schwinn says the TN ALL Corps tutoring program is working in tandem with other efforts to boost student success, like a statewide literacy and phonics program called Reading 360.
Mr. Hurley, the principal at East Side Elementary, appreciates the state subsidizing the tutoring program, but worries about its future at his school when state matching funds expire in three years.
“Hopefully the program will continue to be funded by the state,” he says. “A lot of times education programs are like the snap in [the Avengers movies] from Marvel. You snap your fingers and it disappears.”
Researchers urge schools to build ongoing evaluations into their tutoring programs so district leaders can see results and consider making tutoring a budget item after federal pandemic relief funding expires.
“What we’ve been saying with scaling up is everyone will probably do it a little differently ... so please evaluate,” such as by tracking whether tutors and kids show up, says Kim Dadisman, senior policy and research manager of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. J-PAL sponsors research on effective education interventions, including tutoring.
“It’s important to know that these are working in the way they are intended to work,” she says.
“It’s fun and it helps”
For Sarah, the fifth grade student at East Side Elementary, a recent tutoring session saw her picking three supporting details for an essay about the person she most admires. She likes the individualized attention from the tutor and how much content they can cover during a session.
Her schoolmate Stella Holtsclaw, a third grader, especially enjoys games during tutoring, like preposition bingo, and earning extra recess time.
“I think it’s fun and it helps,” she says.
