IN THE FACE of sweeping declines in student achievement from the learning disruptions of the pandemic, one remedy to the learning loss seemed to stand out – high-dose tutoring.
A solid body of research evidence showed that intensive small group instruction – a tutor working with no more than three students for 30 minutes, at least three times a week, could help them make big gains. Tutoring, studies showed, could help students make up anywhere from a few months to a full year’s worth of learning.
With those promising results in mind, school districts have poured millions of dollars of federal pandemic relief money into tutoring. One estimate pegged the total amount spent by the federal government on tutoring at more than $7.5 billion. But a new analysis raises questions about the headlong rush to deploy tutoring at huge scale.
The analysis, carried out by researchers at Brown University and the University of Virginia, found that the effectiveness of tutoring programs decreases as they grow in size – the very thing that districts and some states are trying to do to address across-the-board decreases in student achievement.
“Our analyses reveal a stark pattern of declining effects of tutoring programs when taken to scale,” write the researchers, who looked at 265 well-controlled studies of tutoring. The analysis found that effects of tutoring in the largest programs – those enrolling more than 1,000 students – were only a third to a half as large as those seen in smaller programs.
“I think people on the ground working in schools and across districts know that moving the needle on achievement is very difficult, especially when you’re trying to do that for millions of kids,” said Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of economics at Brown and the lead author of the report. Kraft, who has been among the biggest proponents of integrating tutoring into US public schools, said the results are more of a reality check than an argument against tutoring. “These findings are only disappointing if you have a frame of reference that is an exaggerated expectation for what is possible,” he said.
While some states and districts have gone big on tutoring – Virginia was aiming to deploy tutoring for all lower-scoring 3-8 grade students – Massachusetts left it to districts to decide how to spend federal pandemic aid money. A few, including Salem and Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School in Fall River, have developed tutoring programs that school leaders say have made a difference.
But the state has not put a lot of pressure on districts to scale up tutoring programs. That hands-off stance has drawn criticism from some education reform advocates, who say the state has not acted with enough urgency to tackle pandemic learning. But the new analysis by Kraft and Beth Schueler of the University of Virginia and Grace Falken of Brown University suggests districts and states might want to pump the brakes a little on any rush to suddenly scale up tutoring, or at least be mindful that such efforts are unlikely to bring the kind of results seen in smaller tutoring initiatives.
Another recent analysis Kraft led on a tutoring effort in Nashville, which enrolled nearly 7,000 students, or almost 10 percent of all students in the district, found only modest gains in reading scores and no effect on math achievement.
Michael Goldstein has had as big a role as any education leader in seeding the idea that tutoring can be a powerful way to accelerate student learning. The Match Charter High School in Boston, which he founded 24 years ago, developed a program of intensive tutoring – staffed by a cadre of young college graduates who lived in dormitory-style housing built on the top floor of the school.
The program showed very strong results, but Goldstein has become a skeptic of the idea that strategies showing impressive results can be brought to scale. “If people aren’t there sweating the details, watching the kids, firing the weak tutors, aggressively managing – it’s like everything else in education and in the world,” Goldstein said last month on a podcast of the Fordham Institute, a Washington, DC-based education nonprofit. When things are taken to scale, he said, ideas that show great promise when implemented by people passionately committed to their success often lose their punch as too many people are just going through the motions of making them work.
“This work is too hard to respond well to what I think often comes up in education,” he said on the Fordham podcast, which is a constant parade of new policy edicts handed down with great fervor, but often quickly supplanted by the next big thing to come along. “Last year, we were told to really focus on teacher evaluation, so we’ll do a half-assed version of teacher evaluation – that will never work in real life. And this year we’re being told to do phonics, so we’ll do it with such half-assedness that it will never make a difference in real life.”
Goldstein said on the podcast that he’s been part of several ideas that show great promise when done with great fidelity, but then don’t have nearly the same impact when done at larger scale. In addition to tutoring, he pointed to research done on Boston’s charter school sector that showed stunning achievement gains. National studies, however, have shown charter schools to be no better or worse, on average, than district schools.
“The idea of transferring the best practices – I used to believe it” Goldstein said. “I don’t see it now, so I’m less in on it as a way forward. Therefore, I sort of feel unarmed as I come to this fight of what’s the right policy? What’s the right policy if the scale up of best practices doesn’t truly seem to be a path forward?
Kraft says we should recalibrate our expectations for tutoring, not give up on it. “Tutoring has tremendous potential, but it is still not a silver bullet,” he said.
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