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.

Two Years of Second Grade? Really?

In a recent blog, Mike Petrilli, President of the Fordham Institute, floated an interesting idea. Given the large numbers of students in high-poverty schools who finish elementary school far behind, what if we gave them all a second year of second grade? (he calls it “2.5”). This, he says, would give disadvantaged schools another year to catch kids up, without all the shame and fuss of retaining them.

At one level, I love this idea, but not on its merits. One more year of second grade would cost school districts or states the national average per-pupil cost of $11,400. So would I like to have $11,400 more for every child in a school district serving many disadvantaged students? You betcha. But another year of second grade is not in the top hundred things I’d do with it.

Just to give you an idea of what we’re talking about, my state, Maryland, has about 900,000 students in grades K-12. Adding a year of second grade for all of them would cost about $10,260,000,000. If half of them are, say, in Title 1 schools (one indicator of high poverty), that’s roughly $5 billion and change. Thanks, Mike! To be fair, this $5 billion would be spent over a 12-year period, as students go through year 2.5, so let’s say only a half billion a year.

What could Maryland’s schools do with a half billion dollars a year? Actually, I wrote them a plan, arguing that if Maryland were realistically planning to ensure the success of every child on that state tests, they could do it, but it would not be cheap.

What Maryland, or any state, could do with serious money would be to spend it on proven programs, especially for struggling learners. As one example, consider tutoring. The well-known Reading Recovery program, for instance, uses a very well-trained tutor working one-to-one with a struggling first grader for about 16 weeks. The cost was estimated by Hollands et al. (2016) at roughly $4600. So Petrilli’s second grade offer could be traded for about three years of tutoring, not just for struggling first graders, but for every single student in a high-poverty school. And there are much less expensive forms of tutoring. It would be easy to figure out how every single student in, say, Baltimore, could receive tutoring every single year of elementary school using paraprofessionals and small groups for students with less serious problems and one-to-one tutoring for those with more serious problems (see Slavin, Inns, & Pellegrini, 2018).

Our Evidence for ESSA website lists many proven, highly effective approaches in reading and math. These are all ready to go; the only reason that they are not universally used is that they cost money, or so I assume. And not that much money, in the grand scheme of things.

I don’t understand why, even in this thought experiment, Mike Petrili is unwilling to consider the possibility of spending serious money on programs and practices that have actually been proven to work. But in case anyone wants to follow up on his idea, or at least pilot it in Maryland, please mail me $5 billion, and I will make certain that every student in every high-poverty school in the state does in fact reach the end of elementary school performing at or near grade level. Just don’t expect to see double when you check in on our second graders.

References

Hollands, F. M., Kieffer, M. J., Shand, R., Pan, Y., Cheng, H., & Levin, H. M. (2016). Cost-effectiveness analysis of early reading programs: A demonstration with recommendations for future research. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 9(1), 30-53.

Slavin, R. E., Inns, A., Pellegrini, M. & Lake (2018). Response to proven instruction (RTPI): Enabling struggling learners. Submitted for publication.

Photo credit: By Petty Officer 1st Class Jerry Foltz (https://www.dvidshub.net/image/383907) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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.

What Schools in One Place Can Learn from Schools Elsewhere

In a recent blog, I responded to an article by Lisbeth Schorr and Srik Gopal about their concerns that the findings of randomized experiments will not generalize from one set of schools to another. I got a lot of supportive response to the blog, but I realize that I left out a key point.

The missing point was this: the idea that effective programs readily generalize from one place to another is not theoretical. It happens all the time. I try to avoid talking about our own programs, but in this case, it’s unavoidable. Our Success for All program started almost 30 years ago, working with African American students in Baltimore. We got terrific results with those first schools. But our first dissemination schools beyond Baltimore included a Philadelphia school primarily serving Cambodian immigrants, rural schools in the South, small town schools in the Midwest, and so on. We had to adapt and refine our approaches for these different circumstances, but we found positive effects across a very wide range of settings and circumstances. Over the years, some of our most successful schools have been ones serving a Native Americans, such as a school in the Arizona desert and a school in far northern Quebec. Another category of schools where we see outstanding success is ones serving Hispanic students, including English language learners, as in the Alhambra district in Phoenix and a charter school near Los Angeles. One of our most successful districts anywhere is in small-city Steubenville, Ohio. We have established a successful network of SFA schools in England and Wales, where we have extraordinary schools primarily serving Pakistani, African, and disadvantaged White students in a very different policy context from the one we face in the U.S. And yes, we continue to find great results in Baltimore and in cities that resemble our original home, such as Detroit.

The ability to generalize from one set of schools to others is not at all limited to Success for All. Reading Recovery, for example, has had success in every kind of school, in countries throughout the world. Direct Instruction has also been successful in a wide array of types of schools. In fact, I’d argue that it is rare to find programs that have been proven to be effective in rigorous research that then fail to generalize to other schools, even ones that are quite different. Of course, there is great variation in outcomes in any set of schools using any innovative program, but that variation has to do with leadership, local support, resources, and so on, not with a fundamental limitation on generalizability to additional populations.

How is it possible that programs initially designed for one setting and population so often generalize to others? My answer would be that in most fundamental regards, the closer you get to the classroom, the more schools begin to resemble each other. Individual students do not all learn the same way, but every classroom contains a range of students who have a predictable set of needs. Any effective program has to be able to meet those needs, wherever the school happens to be located. For example, every classroom has some number of kids who are confident, curious, and capable, some number who are struggling, some number who are shy and quiet, some number who are troublemakers. Most contain students who are not native speakers of English. Any effective program has to have a workable plan for each of these types of students, even if the proportions of each may vary from classroom to classroom and school to school.

There are reasonable adaptations necessary for different school contexts, of course. There are schools where attendance is a big issue and others where it can be assumed, schools where safety is a major concern and others where it is less so. Schools in rural areas have different needs from those in urban or suburban ones, and obviously schools with many recent immigrants have different needs from those in which all students are native speakers of English. Involving parents effectively looks different in different places, and there are schools in which eyeglasses and other health concerns can be assumed to be taken care of and others where they are major impediments to success. But after the necessary accommodations are made, you come down to a teacher and twenty to thirty children who need to be motivated, to be guided, to have their individual needs met, and to have their time used to greatest effect. You need to have an effective plan to manage diverse needs and to inspire kids to see their own possibilities. You need to fire children’s imaginations and help them use their minds well to write and solve problems and imagine their own futures. These needs exist equally in Peru and Poughkeepsie, in the Arizona desert or the valleys of Wales, in Detroit or Eastern Kentucky, in California or Maine.

Disregarding evidence from randomized experiments because it does not always replicate is a recipe for the status quo, as far as the eye can see. And the status quo is unacceptable. In my experience, the reason programs fail to replicate is that they were never all that successful in the first place, or because they attempt to replicate a form of a model much less robust than the one they researched.

Generalization can happen. It happens all the time. It has to be planned for, designed for, not just assumed, but it can and does happen. Rather than using failure to replicate as a stick to beat evidence-based policy, let’s agree that we can learn to replicate, and then use every tool at hand to do so. There are so many vulnerable children who need better educations, and we cannot be distracted by arguments that “nothing replicates” that are contradicted by many examples throughout the world.

Lessons From Innovators: Calibrating Expectations for i3 Evaluation Results

The process of moving an educational innovation from a good idea to widespread effective implementation is far from straightforward, and no one has a magic formula for doing it. The William T. Grant and Spencer Foundations, with help from the Forum for Youth Investment, have created a community composed of grantees in the federal Investing in Innovation (i3) program to share ideas and best practices. Our Success for All program participates in this community. In this space, I, in partnership with the Forum for Youth Investment, highlight observations from the experiences of i3 grantees other than our own, in an attempt to share the thinking and experience of colleagues out on the front lines of evidence-based reform. This blog post is from Dr. Donald J. Peurach, Assistant Professor of Educational Studies in the University of Michigan’s School of Education. Since 2012, Dr. Peurach has served as an advisor and contributor to the i3 Learning Community. As a researcher who focuses on large-scale educational reform, Dr. Peurach provides his perspective from the front lines.

As a participant-observer in the i3 Learning Community, I have had a front row seat on ambitious efforts by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) to revolutionize educational innovation and reform. Others will soon have a glimpse, too, and the fate of the revolution may well rest on how they interpret what they see.

With its Investing in Innovation (i3) program, OII is investing nearly a billion dollars in the development, validation, and scale up of over one hundred diverse reform initiatives, all subject to rigorous, independent evaluations. In coordination with the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), results will be reported in the What Works Clearinghouse so that decision makers have high-quality information on which to base school improvement efforts.

For most people, their best glimpse of the i3-funded initiatives will come via these evaluation results. Preliminary reports from two scale-up recipients are largely positive:Reading Recovery and Success for All. This is not surprising. Both are well-established enterprises that have been refined through more than two decades of use in thousands of schools.

Additional evaluation results are soon to follow, from a broad array of initiatives not nearly as well established. History predicts that many of these results will be characterized by variability in implementation and outcomes that cloud efforts to determine what works (and what doesn’t). But this, too, would not be surprising. Both researchers and reformers (including contributors to this blog) have long reported that efforts to establish and evaluate ambitious improvement initiatives have been challenged by interactions among the complex problems to be solved in schools, the uncertain research base on which to draw, and the turbulent environments of U.S. public education.

If historical precedents hold, the effect could be to leave OII’s efforts politically vulnerable, as promises of revolution and equivocal results are not a good mix. For example, barely five years after finding support in federal policy, the comprehensive school reform movement met a quick and quiet death, as lofty promises of “break-the-mold” school improvement collided with equivocal evaluation results to contribute to a rapid erosion of political support. This was the case despite a small number of positive outliers having met high standards for evidence of effectiveness (including Success for All).

Yet new developments provide reasons for hope. Within the i3 Learning Community, reformers are collaborating to develop and manage their enterprises as learning systems that improve and persist in the face of complexity, uncertainty, and turbulence. Doing so includes critically analyzing implementation and outcomes in order to understand, explain, and respond to both successes and struggles. Similar work is underway in the Hewlett Foundation’s “Deeper Learning” initiative.

Moreover, rather than passing summary judgment based on quick glimpses, researchers and policymakers are increasingly recognizing the struggles of reformers as legitimate, and they are interpreting equivocality in evaluation results as a reason to push still-deeper into the challenging work of educational innovation and reform. For example, some researchers are working hard to systematically study variation in program effects to determine what works, where, for whom, and why. With new support from IES, other researchers working inside and outside of the academy are advancing improvement-focused evaluation strategies that have great potential to reduce that variation.

Such efforts mark a great advance beyond a narrow focus on determining what works (and what doesn’t). To be clear: Making that determination is, at some point, absolutely essential. After all, the life chances of many, many students hang in the balance. The advance lies in acknowledging that the road to positive results is far rockier than most realize, and that paving it smooth requires supporting reformers in learning to manage the complexity, uncertainty, and turbulence that have long been their undoing.

Indeed, from my front row seat, the revolution in educational innovation and reform looks to be just beginning, with increasing potential to coordinate new, improvement-focused evaluation strategies with more sophisticated impact evaluation strategies in both supporting and assessing educational innovation. Whether that is, in fact, the case will depend in no small part on what others make of the glimpses provided by forthcoming i3 evaluation results: what they make of outlying successes and failures, certainly; but, more importantly, what they make of (and decide to do about) the great, grey space in the middle.

Follow Robert E. Slavin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertSlavin

Lessons from Innovators: Reading Recovery

This blog is based on an interview between the Forum for Youth Investment and Jerry D’Agostino, Professor of Education at the Ohio State University and Director of Reading Recovery’s i3 project. A persistent challenge for programs that have scaled up is how to sustain for the long term. In this interview, D’Agostino shares how this long-standing literacy intervention has dealt with the challenge and how it has reinvented itself over the years in order to stay current.

Stay Fresh
Reading Recovery is a research-based, short-term intervention that involves one-to-one teaching for the lowest-achieving first graders. It began in New Zealand in the 1970’s but has been in operation in the United States for 30 years and has spread across the country. Over the years, Reading Recovery has expanded and contracted depending on funding, interest from school districts, and our capacity. Today there are training centers at 19 universities that equip teachers to deliver the intervention and the program has a presence in some 8,000 schools across 49 states. With that kind of scale and longevity, it can be easy to become complacent and assume the intervention speaks for itself. D’Agostino says just the opposite is true. “We know that being the old brand that has been around for a long time can be hard,” he notes. “You have to think about how to keep the brand fresh. Superintendents want the newest hot thing. Teachers have to know it will work with their kids in their classrooms. We have spent time focused on how to adjust the model to offer new features and respond to current education trends such as the Common Core. You always have to show teachers and administrators how the intervention addresses the issue of the day. For example, it isn’t enough that the intervention produces strong effect sizes. For teachers, that is a meaningless number. They want to know that the program will help their third graders achieve the literacy level now required in nearly 40 states to be promoted to 4th grade.”

Be Flexible but Maintain Your Core
Reading Recovery has taken seriously the idea of identifying the intervention’s core elements and also responding to the educational system’s current needs. They know that one-to-one instruction and 30-minute daily lessons are non-negotiable, but they also recognize that adaptations are needed. For example, innovations in the lesson framework have resulted in a design for classroom instruction (Literacy Collaborative), small groups (Comprehensive Intervention Model), and training for special education and ESL teachers (Literacy Lessons). “Our innovations have come as direct requests from schools,” says D’Agostino. “For example, a school says they need something for English Language Learners and we develop something new for that one school that then becomes a part of our overall product line. It allows growth for Reading Recovery and flexibility for schools.” Another non-negotiable is keeping training centralized. Although teacher leaders can receive training at one of the 19 partner universities, there are only a few places where trainers of teacher leaders can get certified. That allows Reading Recovery to maintain some quality control and fidelity over teacher leader training. “I’ve always been impressed with the fidelity of Reading Recovery instruction,” said D’Aogstino. “I’ve seen Reading Recovery lessons in Zanesville, Ohio and Dublin, Ireland. The framework is the same, but each lesson is different in terms of how the teacher interacts with the student to scaffold literacy learning.

Combine Historical Expertise with Fresh Perspective
D’Agostino is quick to note that one of Reading Recovery’s strengths and challenges is the longevity of its founders and senior leadership. Many of the original developers of the intervention are still in leadership positions. This allows for a historical perspective and continuity of purpose that are rare in education these days. It can also hinder innovation. That is why the organization also tries to find leadership positions for newer faculty and teachers with recent teaching and administrative experience who can bring fresh ideas and a willingness to push for some of the new adjustments to the model that schools are requesting.

Adapt, Adjust, and Meet Schools Where They Are
D’Agostino emphasizes that Reading Recovery’s current success and long history is no reason to sit back and relax. “We have survived a lot of changes over the years. We’ve grown, we’ve shrunk, we’ve survived major threats to our program from other national initiatives. Right now with our i3 grant, we are in a great position. We are going to reach our goal of training 3,700 teachers and producing good effects. But I don’t know that that will position us well for the future. In fact, I won’t be happy if we just reach our goals.” Sustaining an effective intervention and bringing it to more schools and students around the country means innovating, moving, pushing to the next level…and spreading the word. “Schools don’t necessarily hear about government funded initiatives that achieve high evidence standards according to the What Works Clearinghouse,” muses D’Agostino. “They hear from hundreds of vendors each year citing their effectiveness, so how do we distinguish ourselves? We can’t just assume success in our i3 grant will lead to sustainability. Sustainability is all about results. For example, we know that the outcomes are remarkable – most of the lowest-achieving first graders accelerate with Reading Recovery and reach the average of their cohort – but we also know from our annual evaluation that there’s a great deal of variation across schools and teachers. So right now we want to know, what do effective Reading Recovery teachers do and how is that different from less effective Reading Recovery teachers? Knowing more about that black box of teaching will help the intervention overall. And understanding how to foster local ownership will give the intervention its real staying power.”

Follow Robert E. Slavin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertSlavin