Updated: Nov. 23, 2022, 12:31 p.m.|Published: Nov. 23, 2022, 8:03 a.m.
In the furious effort to help students catch up in reading and math after two-plus years of pandemic upheaval, states around the country are zeroing in on a particular strategy: frequent, individualized tutoring.But not Oregon.The state’s 197 school districts have $1.1 billion in federal pandemic aid to spend as they see fit by 2024.So far, only 8% of districts have told the state Department of Education that they are earmarking some of it for so-called “high-dosage” tutoring, despite an emerging consensus among education researchers that it’s one of the most effective ways to help struggling students catch up.Key elements of the high-dose variety are that it takes place one-on-one or in groups of no more than three, during the school day, multiple times per week, with the same adult. If done right, researchers say, it can bring students up an entire grade level within a single school year.High-quality tutoring like this is expensive and potentially difficult to staff and sustain. Teachers and administrators need to monitor student progress, and—ideally—carve out time for tutoring within the school day. Companies offering virtual tutoring services have flooded into the market in the past few years, and districts need to figure out which if any are worth the money.To combat the difficulty of getting tutoring programs up and running, a number of states — including Tennessee, New Jersey, Texas and Illinois — have launched concerted efforts to help districts navigate the tutoring landscape, including creating databases of recommended virtual tutoring providers and connecting districts with a network of in-person tutors from local universities and volunteer programs.Oregon, by contrast, has isolated efforts in the planning stages in a handful of school districts and pilot programs getting off the ground in others.“Districts are best positioned to understand their student and community needs,” said Marc Siegel, spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Education. “[Federal pandemic relief] funds empower districts to tailor their efforts to these local needs.
At 12:11 pm every weekday, the bright, open atrium at the center of Durham Elementary in Tigard is quiet and empty, with most students off at recess or lunch. Two minutes later, the chattering of 16 second graders bounces off the rafters, as students race in, grab their seats, find an iPad, slip on a giant pair of headphones and greet their reading tutors, who are beaming in from around the country.All 16 read below grade level, but that doesn’t mean they all need the same help.
Some are still working on sounding out individual letters (“Zz for zebra”), some are on compound blends (“Ch for chap or chat”), some can “partner read” a simple paragraph, taking turns with their tutor, sentence by sentence.The urgent goal: Get them to grade level by the end of the year.
Decades of research shows that if students can’t read independently by third grade, they’re at much greater risk of falling behind, and ultimately, dropping out.
Durham serves a greater concentration of students navigating poverty than most of Tigard-Tualatin’s nine other elementaries, which is part of why district officials chose it to pilot the high-dose help. All children taking part are in special education, eligible for free school meals or learning English as a second language.
The chosen 16 see their tutors every school day for 15-minute sessions. The same grown-up, day in and day out, offers patient, phonics-based instruction. Though the program has only been in place since early October, Durham principal Cleann Brewer says most of the children have already shown measurable improvement.Sixty-three percent of them are reading six to 10 more grade-level words per minute than when tutoring started seven weeks ago, which Brewer says is “huge.”“Some of these kids didn’t do well online, so I was skeptical at first,” she says. “But they show up on time every day. They’re really disappointed if there is some kind of tutor issue. And they are engaged 100% of those minutes.”It doesn’t, however, come cheap.
Tigard-Tualatin is spending $40,000 to pilot this program at Durham this year. If any of the initial participants improve enough to hit grade level, another child can have their seat.Across Oregon, just 15 districts have informed the state that they plan to spend a portion of their federal relief funds on high-dosage tutoring, Siegel says. That includes four of the state’s largest districts — Portland, Salem, Eugene and Medford — and some of its smallest, including the Annex School District in Malheur County, with just 61 students. (The rest are Culver, Dallas, Douglas County, Lincoln County, Malheur County, Mollala River, South Umpqua, Sutherlin and Three Rivers/Josephine County.)An additional 17 districts have told the state they are setting aside at least some of their federal money for tutoring but have yet to specify how many times a week it will be offered to students and for how long.
Some districts could be offering high-dose tutoring using other funding sources that don’t require them to tell the state what they’re spending it on.BEYOND K-5In an ideal world, individualized instruction would be much more broadly available, even for students who are at grade level but could have been much further along if not for pandemic-related disruptions, says Andrew McEachin, a program director at Portland-based testing and research outfit NWEA.Still, the Durham program is well-designed, he says, starting with the fact that the tutoring is built into the school day. Brewer says she pushed for that, so she and others on her staff could pop in regularly to make sure everything was running smoothly and consistently. The second graders miss 15 minutes of math instruction, but their teachers go over what they’ve missed when they return, while their classmates are doing independent work.Holding tutoring before school ran the risk of kids oversleeping or busy caregivers not getting there in time, she says; after school, many kids peel off for other activities or are simply spent after the school day.
Virtual tutoring programs like the Ignite! Reading one in use at Durham are gaining in popularity, particularly given a tight job market in the Portland area as well as in the more rural corners of the state, which have long struggled to hire and keep educators. A virtual program should include a live, trained tutor on the other side of the camera, McEachin says. Chat-based, self-paced-and-monitored programs can leave students disengaged and frustrated, he says.And while many districts are gearing their tutoring programs to younger students, McEachin points out that they have more years of schooling to get caught up, while middle and high schoolers’ window is closing more rapidly.
Portland Public Schools has nearly $1.1 million in federal pandemic relief funds set aside for a high-dosage tutoring program. District officials say tutoring will begin to roll out in January at elementary and K-8 schools with the highest need for reading support. Tutoring for middle schoolers and high schoolers will follow later, they say.Portland’s programs will operate three days a week after school, with 30- to 45-minute in-person sessions led by district employees. Each tutor will be paired with no more than three students. Participation will be voluntary but highly encouraged, with outreach to families from teachers and administrators.Few other metro-area districts have told the state that they plan to spend federal pandemic relief funds on tutoring.
The Reynolds School District, where test scores suggest that most children are below grade level, makes no mention of it in the budget document that they were required to file with the state. The Beaverton School District says it is spending federal relief dollars on half-time “academic coaches” at all of its elementary schools and full-time ones at its middle schools, at a cost of about $4.5 million a year. Their duties are split between professional development for teachers and individual help for students.Corbett, on the outskirts of Multnomah County, spent $30,000 to hire a math paraeducator who leads one-on-one math tutoring on Fridays, and $37,000 for a part-time language arts teacher who also tutors on Fridays.
Some parents are taking matters into their own hands. In Beaverton, Amanda Coen, whose children attend Raleigh Hills K-8, raised money for an after-school tutoring program there that is just getting up and running. It’s for 10 second and third graders who are struggling with reading and gives them an hour a week with an online one-on-one tutor. It also provides 15 minutes a day of reading games to do on a computer at home, with devices given to families in need.Her goal and hope, Coen says, is to expand the pilot into all of the district’s 32 elementary schools, but the price tag is substantial. It cost $35,000 just to get her phonics-based pilot into Raleigh Hills for this school year. But having seen her own daughter, now a middle schooler, struggle with literacy, she knew firsthand the desperation kids might be feeling.“My turning point was laying in bed with my daughter, and she was crying,” Coen recalled of a conversation a few years ago. “And she said, ‘I feel really dumb, because I don’t know when to turn the page. [So] I just wait until the person next to me turns the page, so I don’t look like I am falling behind, or reading slow.’ She wasn’t reading. She didn’t know how to read.”Tutoring is not a silver bullet, more like one arrow in a quiver.
Schools nationwide are experimenting with multiple strategies to help with academic recovery. Doubling up on math instruction during the school day is one possibility. Extending the school day or school year is another, but requires reopening contract negotiations with teacher unions, which could prove contentious, particularly for a workforce that already feels both burnt out and under the gun. Summer school holds promise but needs family buy-in and careful design.The Biden administration, meanwhile, is placing a high-stakes bet on the power of tutoring, underwriting an ambitious plan to send 250,000 tutors into American schools over the next three years.Some education researchers say the effort should go even further. They’ve called for an all-hands-on-deck approach to tutoring. Send high-achieving high schoolers and community college students into the elementary schools to earn credits, they say, and college students into middle and high schools. Mobilize parent volunteers and retired teachers and call in Americorps, they say, given the dire results on national and state test scores.Such efforts sound wonderful in theory but would be logistically challenging, said Brewer, the principal in Tigard, given the effort of finding and training qualified tutors, and then making sure that they stick with the job.Virtual programs outsource that work, but districts need to make sure they are aligned with their core curriculum standards and capable of tracking and reporting student progress, McEachin said.
Christine Pitts, the director of impact at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University and a former research and evaluation lead at Portland Public Schools, said the complex logistics of launching a successful tutoring program at the needed scale is precisely why districts need more specific direction from the state.“Teachers do tutoring. And there is small group instruction to address student learning needs. That’s happening. But in typical Oregon fashion, it’s patchwork,” Pitts said. “From one part of the state to another, you have people developing different initiatives here and there. It’s important for us to have local adaptations based on different challenges and communities. But when you have [all the] districts in the state doing all different things, it’s really hard for state leaders to point to successes across the state to say that we had big wins.”
— Julia Silverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com, @jrlsilverman
