The Role of Research and Development in Post-Covid Education

Everyone knows that during World War II, the pace of innovation greatly accelerated. Computers, rocketry, jets, sonar, radar, microwaves, aerosol cans, penicillin, and morphine were among the many wartime developments. What unites these innovations, of course, is that each was developed to solve an urgent problem important to the war effort, and all of them later tuned out to have revolutionary benefits for civilian use. Yet these advances could not have taken place so quickly if not for the urgent need for innovations and the massive resources devoted to them.

Crisis can be the catalyst for innovation.

Today, we face Covid, a dire medical crisis, and investments of massive resources have produced vaccines in record time. However, the Covid pandemic has also created an emergency in education, as millions of children are experiencing educational losses due to school closures. The Institute for Education Sciences (IES) has announced a grants program to respond to the Covid crisis, but at the usual pace, the grants will only lead to practical solutions in many years when (we fervently hope) the crisis will be over.

I would argue that in this perilous time, research in education should focus on urgent practical problems that could have a significant impact within, say, the next year or two on the problems of students who are far below grade level in essential skills because of Covid school closures, or for other reasons:

1. Tutoring. Yes, of course I was going to start with tutoring. The biggest problem in tutoring is that while we have many proven programs for elementary reading, especially for grades K-3, we have far fewer proven programs ready for prime time in the upper elementary grades, and none at all in middle or high school reading. Studies in England have found positive effects of tutoring in their equivalent of middle school, but none of these exist in the U.S. In mathematics, there are few proven tutoring programs in elementary school, and just one I know of for middle school, and one for high school.

How could research funding produce new tutoring programs for middle and high school reading, and for math at all grade levels, in such a short time?  Simple. First, there are already tutoring programs for reading and math at all grade levels, but few have been successfully evaluated, or (in most cases) ever evaluated at all in rigorous experiments. So it would be important to fund evaluations of particularly promising programs that are already working at significant scale.

Another means of rapidly discovering effective tutoring programs would be to fund programs that have been successful in certain grade levels to quickly create programs for adjacent grades. For example, a program proven effective in grades 2-3 should be able to be significantly modified to work in grades 4-5. One that works in grades 4-5 could be modified for use in middle school. Programs proven effective in reading might be modified for use in mathematics at the same grade level, or vice versa. Many programs with successful programs in some grade levels have the staff and experience to quickly create programs in adjacent grade levels.

Also, it might be possible for developers of successful classwide technology programs to create and pilot tutoring models using similar software, but adding the assistance of a tutor for groups of one to four students, perhaps in collaboration with experts on tutoring.

2. Approaches other than tutoring.  There are many effective reading and math programs of all kinds, not just tutoring, that have proven their effectiveness (see www.evidenceforessa.org). Such programs might be ready to go as they are, and others could be evaluated in a form appropriate to the current emergency. Very few programs other than tutoring obtain effect sizes like those typical of the best tutoring programs, but classwide programs with modest effect sizes serve many more students than tutoring programs do. Also, classroom programs might be evaluated for their capacity to maintain gains made due to tutoring.

Tutoring or non-tutoring programs that already exist at scale, or that could be quickly adapted from proven programs, might be ready for rigorous, third-party evaluations as soon as fall, 2021. These programs should be evaluated using rigorous, third-party evaluations, with all programs at a given grade level using identical procedures and measures. In this way, it should be possible to have many new, proven programs by the end of the 2021-2022 school year, ready for dissemination in fall, 2022. This would be in time to greatly add capacity to serve the millions of students who need proven programs to help them make rapid progress toward grade level.

A research program of this kind could be expensive, and it may not provide theoretical breakthroughs. However, given the substantial and obvious need, and the apparent willingness of government to provide major resources to combat Covid learning losses, such a research effort might be feasible. If it were to take place, it might build excitement about R & D as a practical means of enhancing student achievement. And if even a quarter of the experiments found sizable positive impacts, this would add substantially to our armamentarium of proven strategies for struggling students.

There is an old saying in social work: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” As in World War II, the educational impacts of the Covid pandemic present educational research with a crisis that we must solve, but if we can solve any portion of this problem, this will create benefits for generations of children long after Covid has faded into a distant memory.

Photo credit: User Messybeast on en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

Highlight Tutoring Among Post-Covid Solutions

I recently saw a summary of the education section of the giant, $1.9 trillion proposed relief bill now before Congress. Like all educators, I was delighted to see the plan to provide $130 billion to help schools re-open safely, and to fund efforts to remedy the learning losses so many students have experienced due to school closures.

However, I was disappointed to see that the draft bill suggests that educators can use whatever approaches they like, and it specifically mentioned summer school and after school programs as examples.

Clearly, the drafters of this legislation have not been reading my blogs! On September 10th I wrote a blog reviewing research on summer school and after school programs as well as tutoring and other approaches. More recently, I’ve been doing further research on these recommendations for schools to help struggling students. I put my latest findings into two tables, one for reading and one for math. These appear below.

As you can see, not all supplemental interventions for struggling students are created equal. Proven tutoring models (ones that were successfully evaluated in rigorous experiments) are far more effective than other strategies. The additional successful strategy is our own Success for All whole-school reform approach (Cheung et al., in press), but Success for All incorporates tutoring as a major component.

However, it is important to note that not all tutoring programs are proven to be effective. Programs that do not provide tutors with structured materials and guidance with extensive professional development and in-class coaching, or use unpaid tutors whose attendance may be sporadic, have not produced the remarkable outcomes typical of other tutoring programs.

Tutoring

As Tables 1 and 2 show, proven tutoring programs produce substantial positive effects on reading and math achievement, and nothing else comes close (see Gersten et al., 2020; Neitzel et al., in press; Nickow et al. 2020; Pellegrini et al., 2021; Wanzek et al., 2016).

Tables 1 and 2 only include results from programs that use teaching assistants, AmeriCorps members (who receive stipends), and unpaid volunteer tutors. I did not include programs that use teachers as tutors, because in the current post-Covid crisis, there is a teacher shortage, so it is unlikely that many certified teachers will serve as tutors. Also, research in both reading and math finds little difference in student outcomes between teachers and teaching assistants or AmeriCorps members, so there is little necessity to hire certified teachers as tutors. Unpaid tutors have not been as effective as paid tutors.

Both one-to-one and one-to-small group tutoring by teaching assistants can be effective. One-to-one is somewhat more effective in reading, on average (Neitzel et al., in press), but in math there is no difference in outcomes between one-to-one and one-to-small group (Pellegrini et al., 2021).

Success for All

Success for All is a whole-school reform approach. A recent review of 17 rigorous studies of Success for All found an effect size of +0.51 for students in the lowest 25% of their grades (Cheung et al., in press). However, such students typically receive one-to-one or one-to-small group tutoring for some time period during grades 1 to 3. Success for All also provides all teachers professional development and materials focusing on phonics in grades K-2 and comprehension in grades 2-6, as well as cooperative learning in all grades, parent support, social-emotional learning instruction, and many other elements. So Success for All is not just a tutoring approach, but tutoring plays a central role for the lowest-achieving students.

Summer School

A recent review of research on summer school by Xie et al. (2020) found few positive effects on reading or math achievement. In reading, there were two major exceptions, but in both cases the students were in grades K to 1, and the instruction involved one-to-small group tutoring in phonics. In math, none of the summer school studies involving low-achieving students found positive effects.

After School

A review of research on after-school instruction in reading and math found near-zero impacts in both subjects (Kidron & Lindsay, 2014).

Extended Day

A remarkable study of extended day instruction was carried out by Figlio et al. (2018). Schools were randomly assigned to receive one hour of additional reading instruction for a year, or to serve as a control group. The outcomes were positive but quite modest (ES=+0.09) considering the considerable expense.

Technology

Studies of computer-assisted instruction and other digital approaches have found minimal impacts for struggling students (Neitzel et al., in press; Pellegrini et al., 2021).

Policy Consequences

The evidence is clear that any effort intended to improve the achievement of students struggling in reading or mathematics should make extensive use of proven tutoring programs. Students who have fallen far behind in reading or math need programs known to make a great deal of difference in a modest time period, so struggling students can move toward grade level, where they can profit from ordinary teaching. In our current crisis, it is essential that we follow the evidence to give struggling students the best possible chance of success.

References

Cheung, A., Xie, C., Zhang, T., Neitzel, A., & Slavin, R. E. (in press). Success for All: A quantitative synthesis of evaluations. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness.

Figlio, D., Holden, K., & Ozek, U. (2018). Do students benefit from longer school days? Regression discontinuity evidence from Florida’s additional hour of literacy instruction. Economics of Education Review, 67, 171-183.

Gersten, R., Haymond, K., Newman-Gonchar, R., Dimino, J., & Jayanthi, M. (2020). Meta-analysis of the impact of reading interventions for students in the primary grades. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 13(2), 401–427.

Kidron, Y., & Lindsay, J. (2014). The effects of increased learning time on student academic and nonacademic outcomes: Findings from a meta‑analytic review (REL 2014-015). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia.

Neitzel, A., Lake, C., Pellegrini, M., & Slavin, R. (in press). A synthesis of quantitative research on programs for struggling readers in elementary schools. Reading Research Quarterly.

Pellegrini, M., Neitzel, A., Lake, C., & Slavin, R. (2021). Effective programs in elementary mathematics: A best-evidence synthesis. AERA Open, 7 (1), 1-29.

Wanzek, J., Vaughn, S., Scammacca, N., Gatlin, B., Walker, M. A., & Capin, P. (2016). Meta-analyses of the effects of tier 2 type reading interventions in grades K-3. Educational Psychology Review, 28(3), 551–576. doi:10.1007/s10648-015-9321-7

Xie, C., Neitzel, A., Cheung, A., & Slavin, R. E. (2020). The effects of summer programs on K-12 students’ reading and mathematics achievement: A meta-analysis. Manuscript submitted for publication.

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

Is a National Tutoring Corps Affordable?

Tutoring is certainly in the news these days. The December 30 Washington Post asked its journalists to predict what the top policy issues will be for the coming year. In education, Laura Meckler focused her entire prediction on just one issue: Tutoring. In an NPR interview (Kelly, 2020) with John King, U. S. Secretary of Education at the end of the Obama Administration and now President of Education Trust, the topic was how to overcome the losses students are certain to have sustained due to Covid-19 school closures. Dr. King emphasized tutoring, based on its strong evidence base. McKinsey (Dorn et al., 2020) did a report on early information on how much students have lost due to the school closures and what to do about it. “What to do” primarily boiled down to tutoring. Earlier articles in Education Week (e.g., Sawchuk, 2020) have also emphasized tutoring as the leading solution. Two bills introduced in the Senate by Senator Coons (D-Delaware) proposed a major expansion of AmeriCorps, mostly to provide tutoring and school health aides to schools suffering from Covid-19 school closures.

            All of this is heartening, but many of these same sources are warning that all this tutoring is going to be horrifically expensive and may not happen because we cannot afford it. However, most of these estimates are based on a single, highly atypical example. A Chicago study (Cook et al., 2015) of a Saga (or Match Education) math tutoring program for ninth graders estimated a per-pupil cost of one-to-two tutoring all year of $3,600 per student, with an estimate that at scale, the costs could be as low as $2,500 per student. Yet these estimates are unique to this single program in this single study. The McKinsey report applied the lower figure ($2,500 per student) to cost out tutoring for half of all 55 million students in grades k-12. They estimated an annual cost of $66 billion, just for math tutoring!

            Our estimate is that the cost of a robust national tutoring plan would be more like $7.0 billion in 2021-2022. How could these estimates be so different?  First, the Saga study was designed as a one-off demonstration that disadvantaged students in high school could still succeed in math. No one expected that Saga Math could be replicated at a per-pupil cost of $3,600 (or $2,500). In fact, a much less expensive form of Saga Math is currently being disseminated. In fact, there are dozens of cost-effective tutoring programs widely used and evaluated since the 1980s in elementary reading and math. One is our own Tutoring With the Lightning Squad (Madden & Slavin, 2017), which provides tutors in reading for groups of four students and costs about $700 per student per year. There are many proven small-group tutoring programs known to make a substantial difference in reading or math performance, (see Neitzel et al., in press; Nickow et al., 2020; Pellegrini et al., in press). These programs, most of which use teaching assistants as tutors, cost more like $1,500 per student, on average, based on the average cost of five tutoring programs used in Baltimore elementary schools (Tutoring With the Lightning Squad, Reading Partners, mClass Tutoring, Literacy Lab, and Springboard).

            Further, it is preposterous to expect to serve 27.5 million students (half of all students in k-12) all in one year. At 40 students per tutor, this would require hiring 687,500 tutors!

            Our proposal (Slavin et al., 2020) for a National Tutoring Corps proposes hiring 100,000 tutors by September, 2021, to provide proven one-to-one or (mostly) one-to-small group tutoring programs to about 4 million grade 1 to 9 students in Title I schools. This number of tutors would serve about 21% of Title I students in these grades in 2021-2022, at a cost of roughly $7.0 billion (including administrative costs, development, evaluation, and so on). This is less than what the government of England is spending right now on a national tutoring program, a total of £1 billion, which translates to $7.8 billion (accounting for the differences in population).

            Our plan would gradually increase the numbers of tutors over time, so in later years costs could grow, but they would never surpass $10 billion, much less $66 billion just for math, as estimated by McKinsey.

            In fact, even with all the money in the world, it would not be possible to hire, train, and deploy 687,500 tutors any time soon, at least not tutors using programs proven to work. The task before us is not to just throw tutors into schools to serve lots of kids. Instead, it should be to provide carefully selected tutors with extensive professional development and coaching to enable them to implement tutoring programs that have been proven to be effective in rigorous, usually randomized experiments. No purpose is served by deploying tutors in such large numbers so quickly that we’d have to make serious compromises with the amount and quality of training. Poorly-implemented tutoring would have minimal outcomes, at best.

            I think anyone would agree that insisting on high quality at substantial scale, and then growing from success to success as tutoring organizations build capacity, is a better use of taxpayers’ money than starting too large and too fast, with unproven approaches.

            The apparent enthusiasm for tutoring is wonderful. But misplaced dollars will not ensure the outcomes we so desperately need for so many students harmed by Covid-19 school closures. Let’s invest in a plan based on high-quality implementation of proven programs and then grow it as we learn more about what works and what scales in sustainable forms of tutoring.

Photo credit: Deeper Learning 4 All, (CC BY-NC 4.0)

References

Cook, P. J., et al. (2016) Not too late: Improving academic outcomes for disadvantaged youth. Available at https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/documents/working-papers/2015/IPR-WP-15-01.pdf

Dorn, E., et al. (2020). Covid-19 and learning loss: Disparities grow and students need help. New York: McKinsey & Co.

Kelly, M. L. (2020, December 28). Schools face a massive challenge to make up for learning lost during the pandemic. National Public Radio.

Madden, N. A., & Slavin, R. E. (2017). Evaluations of technology-assisted small-group tutoring for struggling readers. Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 33(4), 327–334. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2016.1255577

Neitzel, A., Lake, C., Pellegrini, M., & Slavin, R. (in press). A synthesis of quantitative research on programs for struggling readers in elementary schools. Reading Research Quarterly.

Nickow, A. J., Oreopoulos, P., & Quan, V. (2020). The transformative potential of tutoring for pre-k to 12 learning outcomes: Lessons from randomized evaluations. Boston: Abdul Latif Poverty Action Lab.

Pellegrini, M., Neitzel, A., Lake, C., & Slavin, R. (in press). Effective programs in elementary mathematics: A best-evidence synthesis. AERA Open.

Sawchuk, S. (2020, August 26). Overcoming Covid-19 learning loss. Education Week 40(2), 6.

Slavin, R. E., Madden, N. A., Neitzel, A., & Lake, C. (2020). The National Tutoring Corps: Scaling up proven tutoring for struggling students. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, Center for Research and Reform in Education.

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

Large-Scale Tutoring Could Fail. Here’s How to Ensure It Does Not.

I’m delighted to see that the idea of large-scale tutoring to combat Covid-19 losses has gotten so important in the policy world that it is attracting scoffers and doubters. Michael Goldstein and Bowen Paulle (2020) published five brief commentaries recently in The Gadfly, warning about how tutoring could fail, both questioning the underlying research on tutoring outcomes (maybe just publication bias?) and noting the difficulties of rapid scale up. They also quote without citation a comment by Andy Rotherham, who quite correctly notes past disasters when government has tried and failed to scale up promising strategies: “Ed tech, class size reduction, teacher evaluations, some reading initiatives, and charter schools.” To these, I would add many others, but perhaps most importantly Supplementary Educational Services (SES), a massive attempt to implement all sorts of after school and summer school programs in high-poverty, low-achieving schools, which had near-zero impact, on average.

So if you were feeling complacent that the next hot thing, tutoring, was sure to work, no matter how it’s done, then you have not been paying attention for the past 30 years.

But rather than argue with these observations, I’d like to explain that the plan I’ve proposed, which you will find here, is fundamentally different from any of these past efforts, and if implemented as designed, with adequate funding, is highly likely to work at scale.

1.  Unlike all of the initiatives Rotherham dismisses, unlike SES, unlike just about everything ever used at scale in educational policy, the evidence base for certain specific, well-evaluated programs is solid.  And in our plan, only the proven programs would be scaled.

A little known but crucial fact: Not all tutoring programs work. The details matter. Our recent reviews of research on programs for struggling readers (Neitzel et al., in press) and math (Pellegrini et al., in press) identify individual tutoring programs that do and do not work, as well as types of tutoring that work well and those that do not.

Our scale-up plan would begin with programs that already have solid evidence of effectiveness, but it would also provide funding and third-party, rigorous evaluations of scaled-up programs without sufficient evidence, as well as new programs, designed to add additional options for schools. New and insufficiently evaluated programs would be piloted and implemented for evaluation, but they would not be scaled up unless they have solid evidence of effectiveness in randomized evaluations.

If possible, in fact, we would hope to re-evaluate even the most successful evaluated programs, to make sure they work.

If we stick to repeatedly-proven programs, rigorously evaluated in large randomized experiments, then who cares whether other programs have failed in the past? We will know that the programs being used at scale do work. Also, all this research would add greatly to knowledge about effective and ineffective program components and applications to particular groups of students, so over time, we’d expect the individual programs, and the field as a whole, to gain in the ability to provide proven tutoring approaches at scale.

2.  Scale-up of proven programs can work if we take it seriously. It is true that scale-up has many pitfalls, but I would argue that when scale-up does not occur it is for one of two reasons. First, the programs being scaled were not adequately proven in the first place. Second, the funding provided for scale-up was not sufficient to allow the program developers to scale up under the conditions they know full well are necessary. As examples of the latter, programs that provided well-trained and experienced trainers in their initial studies are often forced by insufficient funding to use trainer-of-trainers models for greatly diminished amounts of training in scale-up. As a result, the programs that worked at small scale failed in large-scale replication. This happens all the time, and this is what makes policy experts conclude that nothing works at scale.

However, the lesson they should have learned instead is just that programs proven to work at small scale can succeed if the key factors that made them work at small scale are implemented with fidelity at large scale. If anything less is done in scale-up, you’re taking big risks.

If well-trained trainers are essential, then it is critical to insist on well-trained trainers. If a certain amount or quality of training is essential, it is critical to insist on it, and make sure it happens in every school using a given program. And so on. There is no reason to skimp on the proven recipe.

But aren’t all these trainers and training days and other elements unsustainable?  This is the wrong question. The right one is, how can we make tutoring as effective as possible, to justify its cost?

Tutoring is expensive, but most of the cost is in the salaries of the tutors themselves. As an analogy, consider horse racing.  Horse owners pay millions for horses with great potential. Having done so, do you think they skimp on trainers or training? Of course not. In the same way, a hundred teaching assistants tutors cost roughly $4 million per year in salaries and benefits alone. Let’s say top-quality training for this group costs $500,000 per year, while crummy training costs $50,000. If these figures are in the ballpark, would it be wise to spend $4,500,000 on a terrific tutoring program, or $4,050,000 on a crummy one?

Successful scale-up takes place all the time in business. How does Starbucks make sure your experience in every single store is excellent? Simple. They have well-researched, well specified, obsessively monitored standards and quality metrics for every part of their operation. Scale-up in education can work just the same way, and in comparison to the costs of front-line personnel, the costs of great are trivially greater than the cost of crummy.

3.  Ongoing research will, in our proposal, formatively evaluate the entire tutoring effort over time, and development and evaluation will continually add new proven programs.  

Ordinarily, big federal education programs start with all kinds of rules and regulations and funding schemes, and these are announced with a lot of hoopla and local and national meetings to explain the new programs to local educators and leaders. Some sort of monitoring and compliance mechanism is put in place, but otherwise the program steams ahead. Several years later, some big research firm gets a huge contract to evaluate the program. On average, the result is almost always disappointing. Then there’s a political fight about just how disappointing the results are, and life goes on.

 The program we have proposed is completely different. First, as noted earlier, the individual programs that are operating at large scale will all be proven effective to begin with, and may be evaluated and proven effective again, using the same methods as those used to validate new programs. Second, new proven programs would be identified and scaled up all the time. Third, numerous studies combining observations, correlational studies, and mini-experiments would be evaluating program variations and impacts with different populations and circumstances, adding knowledge of what is happening at the chalkface and of how and why outcomes vary. This explanatory research would not be designed to decide which programs work and which do not (that would be done in the big randomized studies), but to learn from practice how to improve outcomes for each type of school and application. The idea is to get smarter over time about how to make tutoring as effective as it can be, so when the huge summative evaluation takes place, there will be no surprises. We would already know what is working, and how, and why.

Our National Tutoring Corps proposal is not a big research project, or a jobs program for researchers. The overwhelming focus is on providing struggling students the best tutoring we know how to provide. But using a small proportion of the total allocation would enable us to find out what works, rapidly enough to inform practice. If this were all to happen, we would know more and be able to do more every year, serving more and more struggling students with better and better programs.

So rather than spending a lot of taxpayer money and hoping for the best, we’d make scale-up successful by using evidence at the beginning, middle, and end of the process, to make sure that this time, we really know what we are doing. We would make sure that effective programs remain successful at scale, rather than merely hoping they will.

References

Goldstein, M., & Paulle, B. (2020, Dec. 8) Vaccine-making’s lessons for high-dosage tutoring, Part 1. The Gadfly.

Goldstein, M., & Paulle, B. (2020, Dec. 11). Vaccine-making’s lessons for high-dosage tutoring, Part IV. The Gadfly.

Neitzel, A., Lake, C., Pellegrini, M., & Slavin, R. (in press). A synthesis of quantitative research on programs for struggling readers in elementary schools. Reading Research Quarterly.

Pellegrini, M., Neitzel, A., Lake, C., & Slavin, R. (in press). Effective programs in elementary mathematics: A best-evidence synthesis. AERA Open.

Original photo by Catherine Carusso, Presidio of Monterey Public Affairs

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

A “Called Shot” for Educational Research and Impact

In the 1932 World Series, Babe Ruth stepped up to the plate and pointed to the center field fence. Everyone there understood: He was promising to hit the next pitch over the fence.

And then he did.

That one home run established Babe Ruth as the greatest baseball player ever. Even though several others have long since beaten his record of 60 home runs, no one else ever promised to hit a home run and then did it.

Educational research needs to execute a “called shot” of its own. We need to identify a clear problem, one that must be solved with some urgency, one that every citizen understands and cares about, one that government is willing and able to spend serious money to solve. And then we need to solve it, in a way that is obvious to all. I think the clear need for intensive services for students whose educations have suffered due to Covid-19 school closures provides an opportunity for our own “called shot.”

In my recent Open Letter to President-Elect Biden, I described a plan to provide up to 300,000 well-trained college-graduate tutors to work with up to 12 million students whose learning has been devastated by the Covid-19 school closures, or who are far below grade level for any reason. There are excellent reasons to do this, including making a rapid difference in the reading and mathematics achievement of vulnerable children, providing jobs to hundreds of thousands of college graduates who may otherwise be unemployed, and starting the best of these non-certified tutors on a path to teacher certification. These reasons more than justify the effort. But in today’s blog, I wanted to explain a fourth rationale, one that in the long run may be the most important of all.

A major tutoring enterprise, entirely focusing on high-quality implementation of proven programs, could be the “called shot” evidence-based education needs to establish its value to the American public.

Of course, the response to the Covid-19 pandemic is already supporting a “called shot” in medicine, the rush to produce a vaccine. At this time we do not know what the outcome will be, but throughout the world, people are closely following the progress of dozens of prominent attempts to create a safe and effective vaccine to prevent Covid-19. If this works as hoped, this will provide enormous benefits for entire populations and economies worldwide. But it could also raise the possibility that we can solve many crucial medical problems much faster than we have in the past, without compromising on strict research standards. The funding of many promising alternatives, and rigorous testing of each before they are disseminated, is very similar to what I and my colleagues have proposed for various approaches to tutoring. In both the medical case and the educational case, the size of the problem justifies this intensive, all-in approach. If all goes well with the vaccines, that will be a “called shot” for medicine, but medicine has long since proven its capability to use science to solve big problems. Curing polio, eliminating smallpox, and preventing measles come to mind as examples. In education, we need to earn this confidence, with a “called shot” of our own.

Think of it. Education researchers and leaders who support them would describe a detailed and plausible plan to solve a pressing problem of education. Then we announce that given X amount of money and Y amount of time, we will demonstrate that struggling students can perform substantially better than they would have without tutoring.

We’d know this would work, because part of the process would be identifying a) programs already proven to be effective, b) programs that already exist at some scale that would be successfully evaluated, and c) newly-designed programs that would successfully be evaluated. In each case, programs would have to meet rigorous evaluation standards before qualifying for substantial scale-up. In addition, in order to obtain funding to hire tutors, schools would have to agree to ensure that tutors use the programs with an amount and quality of training, coaching, and support at least as good as what was provided in the successful studies.

Researchers and policy makers who believe in evidence-based reform could confidently predict substantial gains, and then make good on their promises. No intervention in all of education is as effective as tutoring. Tutoring can be expensive, but it does not require a lengthy, uncertain transformation of the entire school. No sensible researcher or reformer would think that tutoring is all schools should do to improve student outcomes, but tutoring should be one element of any comprehensive plan to improve schools, and it happens to respond to the needs of post-Covid education for something that can have a dramatic, relatively quick, and relatively reliable impact.

If all went well in a large-scale tutoring intervention, the entire field of research could gain new respect, a belief among educators and the public that outcomes could be made much better than they are now by systematic applications of research, development, evaluation, and dissemination.

It is important to note that in order to be perceived to work, the tutoring “called shot” need not be proven effective across the board. By my count, there are 18 elementary reading tutoring programs with positive outcomes in randomized evaluations (see below). Let’s say 12 of them are ready for prime time and are put to the test, and 5 of those work very well at scale. That would be a tremendous success, because if we know which five approaches worked, we could make substantial progress on the problem of elementary reading failure. Just as with Covid-19 vaccines, we shouldn’t care how many vaccines failed. All that matters is that one or more of them succeeds, and can then be widely replicated.

I think it is time to do something bold to capture people’s imaginations. Let’s (figuratively) point to the center field fence, and (figuratively) hit the next pitch over it. The conditions today for such an effort are as good as they will ever be, because of universal understanding that the Covid-19 school closures deserve extraordinary investments in proven strategies. Researchers working closely with educators and political leaders can make a huge difference. We just have to make our case and insist on nothing less than whatever it takes. If a “called shot” works for tutoring, perhaps we could use similar approaches to solve other enduring problems of education.

It worked for the Babe. It should work for us, too, with much greater consequences for our children and our society than a mere home run.

*  *  *

Note: A reader of my previous blog asked what specific tutoring programs are proven effective, according to our standards. I’ve listed below reading and math tutoring programs that meet our standards of evidence. I cannot guarantee that all of these programs would be able to go to scale. We are communicating with program providers to try to assess each program’s capacity and interest in going to scale. But these programs are a good place to start in understanding where things stand today.

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

An Open Letter To President-Elect Biden: A Tutoring Marshall Plan To Heal Our Students

Dear President-Elect Biden:

            Congratulations on your victory in the recent election. Your task is daunting; so much needs to be set right. I am writing to you about what I believe needs to be done in education to heal the damage done to so many children who missed school due to Covid-19 closures.

            I am aware that there are many basic things that must be done to improve schools, which have to continue to make their facilities safe for students and cope with the physical and emotional trauma that so many have experienced. Schools will be opening into a recession, so just providing ordinary services will be a challenge. Funding to enable schools to fulfill their core functions is essential, but it is not sufficient.

            Returning schools to the way they were when they closed last spring will not heal the damage students have sustained to their educational progress. This damage will be greatest to disadvantaged students in high-poverty schools, most of whom were unable to take advantage of the remote learning most schools provided. Some of these students were struggling even before schools closed, but when they re-open, millions of students will be far behind.

            Our research center at Johns Hopkins University studies the evidence on programs of all kinds for students who are at risk, especially in reading (Neitzel et al., 2020) and mathematics (Pellegrini et al., 2020). What we and many other researchers have found is that the most effective strategy for struggling students, especially in elementary schools, is one-to-one or one-to-small group tutoring. Structured tutoring programs can make a large difference in a short time, exactly what is needed to help students quickly catch up with grade level expectations.

A Tutoring Marshall Plan

            My colleagues and I have proposed a massive effort designed to provide proven tutoring services to the millions of students who desperately need it. Our proposal, based on a similar idea by Senator Coons (D-Del), would ultimately provide funding to enable as many as 300,000 tutors to be recruited, trained in proven tutoring models, and coached to ensure their effectiveness. These tutors would be required to have a college degree, but not necessarily a teaching certificate. Research has found that such tutors, using proven tutoring models with excellent professional development, can improve the achievement of students struggling in reading or mathematics as much as can teachers serving as tutors.

            The plan we are proposing is a bit like the Marshall Plan after World War II, which provided substantial funding to Western European nations devastated by the war. The idea was to put these countries on their feet quickly and effectively so that within a brief period of years, they could support themselves. In a similar fashion, a Tutoring Marshall Plan would provide intensive funding to enable Title I schools nationwide to substantially advance the achievement of their students who suffered mightily from Covid-19 school closures and related trauma. Effective tutoring is likely to enable these children to advance to the point where they can profit from ordinary grade-level instruction. We fear that without this assistance, millions of children will never catch up, and will show the negative effects of the school closures throughout their time in school and beyond.

            The Tutoring Marshall Plan will also provide employment to 300,000 college graduates, who will otherwise have difficulty entering the job market in a time of recession. These people are eager to contribute to society and to establish professional careers, but will need a first step on that ladder. Ideally, the best of the tutors will experience the joys of teaching, and might be offered accelerated certification, opening a new source of teacher candidates who will have had an opportunity to build and demonstrate their skills in school settings. Like the CCC and WPA programs in the Great Depression, these tutors will not only be helped to survive the financial crisis, but will perform essential services to the nation while building skills and confidence.

            The Tutoring Marshall Plan needs to start as soon as possible. The need is obvious, both to provide essential jobs to college graduates and to provide proven assistance to struggling students.

            Our proposal, in brief, is to ask the U.S. Congress to fund the following activities:

Spring, 2021

• Fund existing tutoring programs to build capacity to scale up their programs to serve thousands of struggling students. This would include funds for installing proven tutoring programs in about 2000 schools nationwide.
• Fund rigorous evaluations of programs that show promise, but have not been evaluated in rigorous, randomized experiments.
• Fund the development of new programs, especially in areas in which there are few proven models, such as programs for struggling students in secondary schools.

Fall, 2021 to Spring, 2022

• Provide restricted funds to Title I schools throughout the United States to enable them to hire up to 150,000 tutors to implement proven programs, across all grade levels, 1-9, and in reading and mathematics. This many tutors, mostly using small-group methods, should be able to provide tutoring services to about 6 million students each year. Schools should be asked to agree to select from among proven, effective programs. Schools would implement their chosen programs using tutors who have college degrees and experience with tutoring, teaching, or mentoring children (such as AmeriCorps graduates who were tutors, camp counselors, or Sunday school teachers).
• As new programs are completed and piloted, third-party evaluators should be funded to evaluate them in randomized experiments, adding to capacity to serve students in grades 1-9. Those programs that produce positive outcomes would then be added to the list of programs available for tutor funding, and their organizations would need to be funded to facilitate preparation for scale-up.
• Teacher training institutions and school districts should be funded to work together to design accelerated certification programs for outstanding tutors.

Fall, 2022-Spring, 2023

• Title I schools should be funded to enable them to hire a total of 300,000 tutors. Again, schools will select among proven tutoring programs, which will train, coach, and evaluate tutors across the U.S. We expect these tutors to be able to work with about 12 million struggling students each year.
• Development, evaluation, and scale-up of proven programs should continue to enrich the number and quality of proven programs adapted to the needs of all kinds of Title I schools.

            The Tutoring Marshall Plan would provide direct benefits to millions of struggling students harmed by Covid-19 school closures, in all parts of the U.S. It would provide meaningful work with a future to college graduates who might otherwise be unemployed. At the same time, it could establish a model of dramatic educational improvement based on rigorous research, contributing to knowledge and use of effective practice. If all goes well, the Tutoring Marshall Plan could demonstrate the power of scaling up proven programs and using research and development to improve the lives of children.

References

Neitzel, A., Lake, C., Pellegrini, M., & Slavin, R. (2020). A synthesis of quantitative research on programs for struggling readers in elementary schools. Available at www.bestevidence.org. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Pellegrini, M., Inns, A., Lake, C., & Slavin, R. (2020). Effective programs in elementary mathematics: A best-evidence synthesis. Available at www.bestevidence.com. Manuscript submitted for publication.

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

Recovery 2020

After a harsh winter, spring has come.

It’s May.  The weather is gorgeous on the Chesapeake, the weather is getting warm, the air is delicious, the flowers are blooming.  From a slight distance, everything seems so normal.   But up close, nothing is normal.  People have settled into patterns of behavior that would be completely bizarre in normal times.  They are wearing masks everywhere as though they have always done so.  Neighbors  are  being as friendly as they can be without getting too close.   Not far away, we know there is chaos and catastrophe, and we all do what we can.  But every day, there is life to be lived, jobs to be done, children to cherish and nurture.

The school year is coming to an end.  In some places, schools have already closed weeks early.   Educators have gotten through the challenges of trying to operate schools when there are no schools to operate.  They have had to use stopgaps, such as distance learning, because there were gaps to stop.  But now we are entering a new phase: Recovery 2020.

Part of Recovery 2020 will be a struggle to open schools while minimizing health risks.  Schools may not even open in September, or may only partially open.  But whenever they fully open, the challenge we face as educators will be to create schools ready to provide extraordinary education to every student, however long they have been out of school and whatever they have experienced in the interim.

In a series of blogs over recent weeks (here, here, and here), I’ve proposed a number of actions schools should take to put students on a new trajectory toward success, engagement, self-esteem, health, and safety.  In this blog, I want to get more specific about some ideas I’d propose to make Recovery 2020 more than a return to the status quo.  More like Status: Go!

1. Strengthen the Core

First, we have to make sure that the  core of the schooling enterprise, teachers, principals, and administrators, are supported, and their jobs are safe.  There will be a recession, but it cannot be allowed to do the damage the last recession did, when schools could not focus and innovate because they were scrambling to hold on to their staff, just to cover classes.  Federal and state funding must be used to ensure that school staffs can focus on their work, not on managing shortage-induced chaos.  Current school staff should also be able to receive top-quality professional development to enable them to use proven, effective teaching methods in the subjects and grade levels they teach, so they can enhance and accelerate their students’ progress.  School nurses, counselors, and other specialists in whole-child development need to be in every school.

2. Train and Deploy Thousands of Tutors in Every State and District

In fall, 2020, schools will open into a recession, yet they will have to make more of a difference in their students’ development than ever before.  Securing the jobs and professional support of school staffs is essential, but not enough.  Students will need personalized, effective support, so they can achieve greater success in school than they have ever had.

If there is a recession, many people will struggle to keep their jobs or to find new ones.  But as always, those who suffer most in a recession are people who are entering the labor market.  There will be millions of college graduates and others ready to work who will find enormous barriers to entering the labor market, which will be overwhelmed keeping experienced workers employed.  This is a huge problem, but also potentially a huge opportunity.  Schools will need help in accelerating student achievement to make up for losses due to school closures and then to continue beyond making up losses to growing gains.  An army of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young people will be eager to get involved serving children.  Government will have to provide relief to these and other unemployed people, so why not have them make a difference in children’s education, rather than just receiving  emergency support?

The solution I am proposing is for government to create a fund, a Marshall Plan for education, to recruit, train, and deploy thousands of tutors in schools across America.  The tutors would be trained, coached, and supervised by experts to deliver proven small-group tutoring models, focused in particular on reading and math, in elementary and middle schools.  They would be paid as teacher assistants, but equipped with specific skills and supports to work with students who are behind in reading or mathematics in elementary or middle schools.  Schools would receive a number of tutors depending on their size and levels of disadvantage and achievement deficits, up to five or more tutors per school.  The tutors would work with struggling students in small groups, using tutoring models proven in rigorous research to be particularly effective.  These models are known to be able to add five or more months of gain to students’ usual yearly progress each year, more than making up the losses most students have experienced.  As time goes on, students who need more tutoring can receive it, so that they can continue to make more than one year’s gain each year, until they reach grade level.

While tutoring is worthwhile in itself, it will also serve a purpose in introducing promising young people to teaching.  School leaders should be enabled to identify especially capable young people who show promise as teachers.  Someone who has been a great tutor will probably become a great teacher.  These people should then be given opportunities to participate in accelerated teacher training leading to certification.  The quality and commitment the tutors show in their daily work will help school leaders identify an extraordinary group of potential teachers to enter classrooms eager and prepared to make a difference.

3. Train and Deploy School Health Aides

Especially in schools serving many disadvantaged children, there are many children who are achieving below their potential just because they need eyeglasses, or suffer from chronic diseases such as asthma.  Trained health aides can be deployed to make sure that students receive needed eyeglasses, regularly take medication for asthma, and otherwise solve health problems that interfere with success in school.  Working with school nurses, health aides will also be needed to manage ongoing protections against Covid-19 and other threats to health.

After a harsh winter, spring has come.  The wise farmer celebrates, but then he plants.  In the same way, America’s education leaders should celebrate that we have somehow made it this far.  But celebration is not enough.  We have to plan, and to plant, anticipating the opportunity this fall not just to get back to normal, but to create a new normal, better than the one we had, in which we use our nation’s strengths to heal and to build.

Recovery 2020 will take efforts and expenditures beyond just returning schools and students to normal.  But this is essential, and the short- and long-term benefits to our children and our society are clear.  If we are are wise, we will start this process now, to prepare to mobilize resources and energies to open in the fall the best schools we ever had.

Photo credit: Collage photos courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

Getting Schools Excited About Participating in Research

If America’s school leaders are ever going to get excited about evidence, they need to participate in it. It’s not enough to just make school leaders aware of programs and practices. Instead, they need to serve as sites for experiments evaluating programs that they are eager to implement, or at least have friends or peers nearby who are doing so.

The U.S. Department of Education has funded quite a lot of research on attractive programs A lot of the studies they have funded have not shown positive impacts, but many have been found to be effective. Those effective programs could provide a means of engaging many schools in rigorous research, while at the same time serving as examples of how evidence can help schools improve their results.

Here is my proposal. It quite often happens that some part of the U.S. Department of Education wants to expand the use of proven programs on a given topic. For example, imagine that they wanted to expand use of proven reading programs for struggling readers in elementary schools, or proven mathematics programs in Title I middle schools.

Rather than putting out the usual request for proposals, the Department might announce that schools could qualify for funding to implement a qualifying proven program, but in order to participate they had to agree to participate in an evaluation of the program. They would have to identify two similar schools from a district, or from neighboring districts, that would agree to participate if their proposal is successful. One school in each pair would be assigned at random to use a given program in the first year or two, and the second school could start after the one- or two-year evaluation period was over. Schools would select from a list of proven programs and choose one that seems appropriate to their needs.

            Many pairs of schools would be funded to use each proven program, so across all schools involved, this would create many large, randomized experiments. Independent evaluation groups would carry out the experiments. Students in participating schools would be pretested at the beginning of the evaluation period (one or two years), and posttested at the end, using tests independent of the developers or researchers.

There are many attractions to this plan. First, large randomized evaluations on promising programs could be carried out nationwide in real schools under normal conditions. Second, since the Department was going to fund expansion of promising programs anyway, the additional cost might be minimal, just the evaluation cost. Third, the experiment would provide a side-by-side comparison of many programs focusing on high-priority topics in very diverse locations. Fourth, the school leaders would have the opportunity to select the program they want, and would be motivated, presumably, to put energy into high-quality implementation. At the end of such a study, we would know a great deal about which programs really work in ordinary circumstances with many types of students and schools. But just as importantly, the many schools that participated would have had a positive experience, implementing a program they believe in and finding out in their own schools what outcomes the program can bring them. Their friends and peers would be envious and eager to get into the next study.

A few sets of studies of this kind could build a constituency of educators that might support the very idea of evidence. And this could transform the evidence movement, providing it with a national, enthusiastic audience for research.

Wouldn’t that be great?

 This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

On Replicability: Why We Don’t Celebrate Viking Day

I was recently in Oslo, Norway’s capital, and visited a wonderful museum displaying three Viking ships that had been buried with important people. The museum had all sorts of displays focused on the amazing exploits of Viking ships, always including the Viking landings in Newfoundland, about 500 years before Columbus. Since the 1960s, most people have known that Vikings, not Columbus, were the first Europeans to land in America. So why do we celebrate Columbus Day, not Viking Day?

Given the bloodthirsty actions of Columbus, easily rivaling those of the Vikings, we surely don’t prefer one to the other based on their charming personalities. Instead, we celebrate Columbus Day because what Columbus did was far more important. The Vikings knew how to get back to Newfoundland, but they were secretive about it. Columbus was eager to publicize and repeat his discovery. It was this focus on replication that opened the door to regular exchanges. The Vikings brought back salted cod. Columbus brought back a new world.

In educational research, academics often imagine that if they establish new theories or demonstrate new methods on a small scale, and then publish their results in reputable journals, their job is done. Call this the Viking model: they got what they wanted (promotions or salt cod), and who cares if ordinary people found out about it? Even if the Vikings had published their findings in the Viking Journal of Exploration, this would have had roughly the same effect as educational researchers publishing in their own research journals.

Columbus, in contrast, told everyone about his voyages, and very publicly repeated and extended them. His brutal leadership ended with him being sent back to Spain in chains, but his discoveries had resounding impacts that long outlived him.

Educational researchers only want to do good, but they are unlikely to have any impact at all unless they can make their ideas useful to educators. Many educational researchers would love to make their ideas into replicable programs, evaluate these programs in schools, and if they are found to be effective, disseminate them broadly. However, resources for the early stages of development and research are scarce. Yes, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and Education Innovation Research (EIR) fund a lot of development projects, and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) provides small grants for this purpose to for-profit companies. Yet these funders support only a tiny proportion of the proposals they receive. In England, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) spends a lot on randomized evaluations of promising programs, but very little on development or early-stage research. Innovations that are funded by government or other funding very rarely end up being evaluated in large experiments, fewer still are found to be effective, and vanishingly few eventually enter widespread use. The exceptions are generally programs crated by large for-profit companies, large and entrepreneurial non-profits, or other entities with proven capacity to develop, evaluate, support, and disseminate programs at scale. Even the most brilliant developers and researchers rarely have the interest, time, capital, business expertise, or infrastructure to nurture effective programs through all the steps necessary to bring a practical and effective program to market. As a result, most educational products introduced at scale to schools come from commercial publishers or software companies, who have the capital and expertise to create and disseminate educational programs, but serve a market that primarily wants attractive, inexpensive, easy-to-use materials, software, and professional development, and is not (yet) willing to pay for programs proven to be effective. I discussed this problem in a recent blog on technology, but the same dynamics apply to all innovations, tech and non-tech alike.

How Government Can Promote Proven, Replicable Programs

There is an old saying that Columbus personified the spirit of research. He didn’t know where he was going, he didn’t know where he was when he got there, and he did it all on government funding. The relevant part of this is the government funding. In Columbus’ time, only royalty could afford to support his voyage, and his grant from Queen Isabella was essential to his success. Yet Isabella was not interested in pure research. She was hoping that Columbus might open rich trade routes to the (east) Indies or China, or might find gold or silver, or might acquire valuable new lands for the crown (all of these things did eventually happen). Educational research, development, and dissemination face a similar situation. Because education is virtually a government monopoly, only government is capable of sustained, sizable funding of research, development, and dissemination, and only the U.S. government has the acknowledged responsibility to improve outcomes for the 50 million American children ages 4-18 in its care. So what can government do to accelerate the research-development-dissemination process?

1. Contract with “seed bed” organizations capable of identifying and supporting innovators with ideas likely to make a difference in student learning. These organizations might be rewarded, in part, based on the number of proven programs they are able to help create, support, and (if effective) ultimately disseminate.
2. Contract with independent third-party evaluators capable of doing rigorous evaluations of promising programs. These organizations would evaluate promising programs from any source, not just from seed bed companies, as they do now in IES, EIR, and EEF grants.
3. Provide funding for innovators with demonstrated capacity to create programs likely to be effective and funding to disseminate them if they are proven effective. Developers may also contract with “seed bed” organizations to help program developers succeed with development and dissemination.
4. Provide information and incentive funding to schools to encourage them to adopt proven programs, as described in a recent blog on technology.  Incentives should be available on a competitive basis to a broad set of schools, such as all Title I schools, to engage many schools in adoption of proven programs.

Evidence-based reform in education has made considerable progress in the past 15 years, both in finding positive examples that are in use today and in finding out what is not likely to make substantial differences. It is time for this movement to go beyond its early achievements to enter a new phase of professionalism, in which collaborations among developers, researchers, and disseminators can sustain a much faster and more reliable process of research, development, and dissemination. It’s time to move beyond the Viking stage of exploration to embrace the good parts of the collaboration between Columbus and Queen Isabella that made a substantial and lasting change in the whole world.

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Tutoring Works. But Let’s Learn How It Can Work Better and Cheaper

I was once at a meeting of the British Education Research Association, where I had been invited to participate in a debate about evidence-based reform. We were having what journalists often call “a frank exchange of views” in a room packed to the rafters.

At one point in the proceedings, a woman stood up and, in a furious tone of voice, informed all and sundry that (I’m paraphrasing here) “we don’t need to talk about all this (very bad word). Every child should just get Reading Recovery.” She then stomped out.

I don’t know how widely her view was supported in the room or anywhere else in Britain or elsewhere, but what struck me at the time, and what strikes even more today, is the degree to which Reading Recovery has long defined, and in many ways limited, discussions about tutoring. Personally, I have nothing against Reading Recovery, and I have always admired the commitment Reading Recovery advocates have had to professional development and to research. I’ve also long known that the evidence for Reading Recovery is very impressive, but you’d be amazed if one-to-one tutoring by well-trained teachers did not produce positive outcomes. On the other hand, Reading Recovery insists on one-to-one instruction by certified teachers with a lot of cost for all that admirable professional development, so it is very expensive. A British study estimated the cost per child at $5400 (in 2018 dollars). There are roughly one million Year 1 students in the U.K., so if the angry woman had her way, they’d have to come up with the equivalent of $5.4 billion a year. In the U.S., it would be more like $27 billion a year. I’m not one to shy away from very expensive proposals if they provide also extremely effective services and there are no equally effective alternatives. But shouldn’t we be exploring alternatives?

If you’ve been following my blogs on tutoring, you’ll be aware that, at least at the level of research, the Reading Recovery monopoly on tutoring has been broken in many ways. Reading Recovery has always insisted on certified teachers, but many studies have now shown that well-trained teaching assistants can do just as well, in mathematics as well as reading. Reading Recovery has insisted that tutoring should just be for first graders, but numerous studies have now shown positive outcomes of tutoring through seventh grade, in both reading and mathematics. Reading Recovery has argued that its cost was justified by the long-lasting impacts of first-grade tutoring, but their own research has not documented long-lasting outcomes. Reading Recovery is always one-to-one, of course, but now there are numerous one-to-small group programs, including a one-to-three adaptation of Reading Recovery itself, that produce very good effects. Reading Recovery has always just been for reading, but there are now more than a dozen studies showing positive effects of tutoring in math, too.

All of this newer evidence opens up new possibilities for tutoring that were unthinkable when Reading Recovery ruled the tutoring roost alone. If tutoring can be effective using teaching assistants and small groups, then it is becoming a practicable solution to a much broader range of learning problems. It also opens up a need for further research and development specific to the affordances and problems of tutoring. For example, tutoring can be done a lot less expensively than $5,400 per child, but it is still expensive. We created and evaluated a one-to-six, computer-assisted tutoring model that produced effect sizes of around +0.40 for $500 per child. Yet I just got a study from the Education Endowment Fund (EEF) in England evaluating one-to-three math tutoring by college students and recent graduates. They only provided tutoring one hour per week for 12 weeks, to sixth graders. The effect size was much smaller (ES=+0.19), but the cost was only about $150 per child.

I am not advocating this particular solution, but isn’t it interesting? The EEF also evaluated another means of making tutoring inexpensive, using online tutors from India and Sri Lanka, and another, using cross-age peer tutors, both in math. Both failed miserably, but isn’t that interesting?

I can imagine a broad range of approaches to tutoring, designed to enhance outcomes, minimize costs, or both. Out of that research might come a diversity of approaches that might be used for different purposes. For example, students in deep trouble, headed for special education, surely need something different from what is needed by students with less serious problems. But what exactly is it that is needed in each situation?

In educational research, reliable positive effects of any intervention are rare enough that we’re usually happy to celebrate anything that works. We might say, “Great, tutoring works! But we knew that.”  However, if tutoring is to become a key part of every school’s strategies to prevent or remediate learning problems, then knowing that “tutoring works” is not enough. What kind of tutoring works for what purposes?  Can we use technology to make tutors more effective? How effective could tutoring be if it is given all year or for multiple years? Alternatively, how effective could we make small amounts of tutoring? What is the optimal group size for small group tutoring?

We’ll never satisfy the angry woman who stormed out of my long-ago symposium at BERA. But for those who can have an open mind about the possibilities, building on the most reliable intervention we have for struggling learners and creating and evaluating effective and cost-effective tutoring approaches seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

Photo Courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action.

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.