Who Knew Tutoring Wouldn't Be a Huge Success, or How I Learned to Frivolously Spend Tax Payer Money Without Really Trying
“That's how it is for us servants. No one pays you much heed; mostly you're invisible as furniture. Yet you overhear a conversation here, and add a little gossip there. A writing desk lies open and you cannot help but read a paper. Then you find something, something you should not have found...”
― Martine Bailey, An Appetite for Violets
Back in the halcyon days of COVID, when we were all flush with government money, state leaders pushed tutoring to combat the dreaded "learning loss" students suffered due to schools being closed during the pandemic.
If we didn't treat this existential threat with the seriousness required, we were dooming an entire generation to wander in the wilderness unable to tie their shoes or manage their checkbook.
In response two of the oldest strategies known to man were proposed - tutoring and summer school. I can hear Fred telling Wilma now, "If we don't get Pebbles into summer school, she'll never do better than Bam Bam. She'll be stuck in a secondhand cave for her whole life."
Tennessee's commissioner of education Penny Schwinn was at the forefront of the tutoring movement. She even came up with a great marketing term to help sell it - High Dosage/Low Ratio tutoring. Sound very effective, doesn't it?
The commissioner went a step further by creating TN AllCorp. This was one of the best grifts ever. Any district in Tennessee could be a member, and be supplied with state-sponsored tutors, they just had to fork over a chunk of their ESSER money and they were in.
Schwinn hyped tutoring as the fastest way for students to recover what they had lost, telling everyone who would listen, “consistently proven to accelerate achievement as quickly as possible”.
State legislators bought into the snake oil being peddled, and tied tutoring to third-grade promotion for students who failed to score proficient on the third grade TCAP. Best part was that if tutoring didn't stick and you failed to make adequate growth in fourth grade, you got retained again and prescribed more of the same medicine that hadn't helped the previous year.
At the time, I raised a few concerns. Ok, i may have said the idea was fucking stupid. But it all kinda was.
Where were tutors going to come from?
How was the state going to ensure that the kids who most needed tutoring, got it?
Since much of the proposed tutoring was being offered online, how was that effective, when online teaching had proven to be ineffective?
I never did get any real answers, but maybe now I'm starting to, and they are fairly predictable.
This week, Jill Barshay took a look at the impact of tutoring on Nashville students, and it wasn't an uplifting story.
She shares a study by researcher, Matthew Kraft. A study that shows tutoring might not be as effective as previously thought, especially when it is scaled up.
Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, was an early proponent of giving tutors — ordinarily a luxury for the rich — to the masses after the pandemic. At the time, he cited research evidence to support his views. The researcher, along with some fellow advocates fiercely lobbied the Biden administration to urge local districts to invest in tutoring programs.
Kraft recently posted results from his follow up study that attempted to measure the effectiveness of the tutoring strategy.
The study, which was posted online in late August 2024, tracked almost 7,000 students who were tutored in Nashville, Tennessee, and calculated how much of their academic progress could be attributed to the sessions of tutoring they received at school between 2021 and 2023. Kraft and his research team found that tutoring produced only a small boost to reading test scores, on average, and no improvement in math. Tutoring failed to lift course grades in either subject.
Here's the money quote for me, and I could have helped him with his awareness.
“I was and continue to be incredibly impressed with the rigorous and wide body of evidence that exists for tutoring and the large average effects that those studies produced,” said Kraft. “I don’t think I paid as much attention to whether those tutoring programs were as applicable to post-Covid era tutoring at scale.”
The issues related by Kraft read like a collection of Dad Gone Wild excerpts from 2022:
As with the launching of any big new program, Nashville hit a series of snags. Early administrators were overwhelmed with “14 bazillion emails,” as educators described them to researchers in the study, before they hired enough staff to coordinate the tutoring program. They first tried online tutoring. But too much time and effort was wasted setting kids up on computers, coping with software problems, and searching for missing headphones. Some children had to sit in the hallway with their tablets and headphones; it was hard to concentrate.
Meanwhile, remote tutors were frustrated by not being able to talk with teachers regularly. Often there was redundancy with tutors being told to teach topics identical to what the students were learning in class.
The content of the tutoring lessons was in turmoil, too. The city scrapped its math curriculum midway. Different grades required different reading curricula. For each of them, Nashville educators needed to create tutor guides and student workbooks from scratch.
Eventually the city switched course and replaced its remote tutors, who were college student volunteers, with teachers at the school who could tutor in-person. That eliminated the headaches of troublesome technology. Also, teachers could adjust the tutoring lessons to avoid repeating exactly what they had taught in class.
But school teachers were fewer in number and couldn’t serve as many students as an army of remote volunteers. Instead of one tutor for each student, teachers worked with three or four students at a time. Even after tripling and quadrupling up, there weren’t enough teachers to tutor everyone during school hours. Half the students had their tutoring sessions scheduled immediately before or right after school.
In interviews, teachers said they enjoyed the stronger relationships they were building with their students. But there were tradeoffs. The extra tutoring work raised concerns about teacher burnout.
Despite the flux, some things improved as the tutoring program evolved. The average number of tutoring sessions that students attended increased from 16 sessions in the earlier semesters to 24 sessions per semester by spring of 2023.
Why the academic gains for students weren’t stronger is unclear. One of Kraft’s theories is that Nashville asked tutors to teach grade-level skills and topics, similar to what the children were also learning in their classrooms and what the state tests would assess. But many students were months, even years behind grade level, and may have needed to learn rudimentary skills before being able to grasp more advanced topics. (This problem surprised me because I thought the whole purpose of tutoring was to fill in missing skills and knowledge!) In the data, average students in the middle of the achievement distribution showed the greatest gains from Nashville’s tutoring program. Students at the bottom and top didn’t progress much, or at all.
Call me Karnac the Magnificent.
Let me call attention to the last line of the previous quote, where Kraft talks about average students in the middle showing the greatest gains. That's what we used to call the "bubble kids", and in the past, they were the primary targets of tutoring because move them an inch and you'd improve the public perception of your school by a mile.
we forget that standardized tests all come with a margin of error. Sometimes you can show growth just by offering a retake on a different day. A preferred day would be one with a minimum of outside negative variables - no fighting parents, no hunger, and plenty of sleep. It's amazing what the omission of any of those factors will do for a test score.
All of this would be slightly amusing, and a cause for a banal "gotcha" moment, save for the money. Millions of dollars were thrown away in pursuit of a foregone conclusion. Money that could have been better invested with professional educators instead of private entities,
Could have invested in teacher aides, allowing for kids to get more individualized instruction.
Could have used the money to hire more teachers to decrease classroom size.
Could have used the money to hire more support staff, so teachers didn't have to perform duties that detract from focus on teaching.
Hell, teacher salaries could have been increased.
I would have even sought financial assistance for prospective teacher candidates looking to become certified.
If I've said it once, I'll say it a thousand times, the number one in-school determinant of student success is the relationship between a teacher and a student, and the quality of that teacher.
The rest is noise.
I get that ESSER came with restrictions on how the money could be used, but many of those restrictions should have been lifted.
The drive for tutoring smacks of a desire to downplay the need for a high-quality teacher. The thinking continually seems to be that teaching is a job anyone can do with a prescribed script.
Kraft's study shows us differently.
On a side note, Commissioner Schwinn has only been gone a year, yet with each passing month, her signature initiatives take on the odor of rotting corpses. TN AllCorp, Grow Your Own, and High-Quality curriculum, are all being exposed for what they are, profit vehicles for private entities with little benefit for students.
If you think it's stinky now, just wait till the next two years when local officials get a whiff of the tax implications associated with Schwinn's funding formula revision. Most municipalities will be looking to raise taxes to cover rapidly growing costs.
Just remember, I warned you first. Well maybe second, JC Bowman, of Professional Educators of Tennessee, has been sounding this alarm for more than a minute.
As Pepe Le Pew used to say, ""When you are a skunk, you learn how to hold your breath for a long time."
Schwinn likes to bill herself as a "change agent". Based on her recent history, I would argue that "rainmaker" is a more fitting descriptor.
Whoever becomes the next Governor, better be prepared to undo a plethora of past mistakes.
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Is it just me, or has Chalkbeat slowed its output since it earned a shout-out on Abbot Elementary? Asking for a friend.
On a side note, The Tennessean's Vivian Jones remains the best education writer in Tennessee. See her name on a byline and odds are, you are about to learn something.
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Speaking of The Tennessean, they've reprised their Student of the Week award for this school year. The first winner is Westmoreland High School student Logan Moore.
Moore is described by Westmorland officials as an outstanding leader in his high school instrumental music program. He is in the top 5% of his class and volunteers time at his local church.
Kudos to the young for earning the award.
Moore was one of eight students nominated for the award by their respective schools. Next week will bring a brand new batch of students.
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In the wake of finding no ethical issues with TN Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds taking money for trips from her former employee - since she repaid the money -the state ethics commission recommends that Governor Lee's cabinet undergo similar ethics training to that of state legislators. Governor Lee embraces the idea.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Lee said. “I think the more people understand exactly what the rules are and how to follow them, the more transparency there is to that, the better it is.”
You have to be kidding. This is an SNL skit waiting to be written.
Does Reynolds really need a class to understand that taking money for a trip from a former employer who lobbies the General Assembly regularly, is not a good look? Ask me, it's pretty self-explanatory. But seeing as she didn't seem to recognize that saying you've lived somewhere for over a year when it's pretty clear you haven't isn't acceptable, maybe.
I can see the possibilities for the class now.
"Yes Mrs Reynolds", the teacher says.
'I'm just trying to get clarity", Reynolds asks. "If a stranger meets me in a dark alley with an envelope of cash and a request for a favor, it is bad. But if it is a friend and it's done at dinner at a nice hotel they paid for at a conference they flew me in for, it's ok?"
"That is incorrect Mrs. Reynolds."
"Really? My friends can't show me their appreciation?", Reynolds responds. "Even if I've known them for years and they are always giving me nice things?"
"No Mrs Reynolds. That is not ethical."
"Well, that sucks. I thought there were perks to this job", Reynolds sighs. "What if my husband is looking for a job, and one of the companies bidding on a contract has an opening, can I give them the contract if they give him the job? Or should I just do a no-bid contract?"
The instructor slowly lowers his head into his hands,
The previous conversation is purely imaginative, but there are plenty of kernels of truth that make it a possibility.
in looking at Reynolds's travel records for 2024, it appears that she did not file a 1st quarter report, but included those in the second quarter, along with a few from 2023. Maybe a class would help with the timely filing of paperwork. Just saying.
The Commissioner easily travels more than anyone else in the Tennessee government. Her filed report shows her making 7 trips. Through in frequent trips home to Texas, you got some frequent flier miles accumulating.
Some of those trips cost the state of Tennessee very little money.
$319 to go to Indianapolis for a Launch Summit.
$304.20 to go to Palm Springs for BARR 2024 National Conference
$48 to attend SREB 's Artificial Intelligence in Education Commission in Columbia South Carolina.
$47.86 to go to a workshop at the George W Bush Institute in Dallas
$339.35 for another SREB shindig in Dallas
$19.50 to go to Baily Colorado for Pahara Institute -Fellows Convening
It's a safe bet those trips cost a bit more than listed, who paid the difference?
I think in light of recent revelations, that's a fair question.
Good luck getting it answered.
One last thing to look at, The ethics complaint listed a trip to Atlanta for Excelin Ed National Summit on Education on 11/15 -11/17/2023 with a cost of $42.00. This is one of the ExcelinEd trips paid for by the non-profit that Reynolds reimbursed out of her pocket.
On the 2024 second-quarter report that same trip is listed but with a cost to the state of $1366.48. Hmmm...so what exactly happened here?
Was Reynolds reimbursed for her out-of-pocket expense or did she and the state just split the bill?
On second thought, maybe that class would make sense.
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Now it’s time to rattle the cup a little bit before I head out the door.
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