The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted learning.1 Now, many of the District’s K-12 students need extra support to get them back on track at school. DC Government is investing in high-impact tutoring (HIT) to help. HIT offers frequent instruction, in small groups or one-on-one, to help students learn.2 We explored ways to strengthen and grow the different approaches to HIT across the city. We worked with schools and tutoring providers to study tutoring implementation and develop options for DC Government to strengthen its support for HIT. Our findings have informed policy conversations on how best to support student success.
Tutor working with two students.
(Credit: Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages)
Why is this issue important in DC?
Students who are behind in their classes are less likely to graduate from high school, go to college, or find good paying jobs.3 The pandemic disrupted learning and caused more students to fall behind. It most affected students of color, students from lower-income families, and students who were already behind.4
What are we doing?
Helping K-12 students who are behind recover from the effects of the pandemic is a priority for DC. The DC Office of the State Superintendent for Education (OSSE) and the Office of Out of School Time Grants and Youth Outcomes are investing $39 million5 in HIT between school year 2021-2022 and school year 2023-2024. In school year 2021-22, they gave just over $3 million6 to tutoring providers to tutor students whose learning was disrupted by the pandemic.
In 2022, The Lab and OSSE staff interviewed school and tutoring staff about their successes and challenges with HIT. Through these interviews, we identified ways that the District can support schools and tutoring providers to increase the quality and reach of their programs.
What have we learned?
There’s already a lot of evidence on how to design HIT programs to best support students. Programs in DC followed a lot of this evidence but faced challenges with delivering tutoring that followed all of it. We identified five areas where DC Government can support schools and tutoring providers:
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● finding and keeping tutors
● promoting strong partnerships between schools and tutoring providers
● choosing a curriculum to support what’s taught in class
● ensuring that all students who may benefit have access to HIT
● improving programming through data and sharing lessons learned
“Our most vulnerable students have fallen even further behind their peers over the course of the pandemic. This investment will help the District accelerate learning for these students and prevent existing achievement gaps from growing.” ”
What comes next?
We developed a list of 25 recommendations for DC Government and its partners to make HIT better. Many of these recommendations are being put in place now. For example:
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● OSSE has made changes to the way they select tutoring providers for funding to ensure tutoring providers are better prepared to meet challenges related to finding tutors and working with schools.
● OSSE is hosting regular “learning community” meetings for tutoring providers so that they can connect with and learn from each other.
1 OSSE. 2022. 2021-22 Assessment Results: PARCC and MSAA.
2 OSSE. 2022. High-Impact Tutoring: Accelerating Student Learning by Expanding Opportunity.
3 US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights. 2021. “Education in a Pandemic: The Disparate Impacts of COVID-19 on America’s Students.”
4 EmpowerK12. 2020. “COVID-19’s Impact on Student Achievement and Academic Growth in DC.”
5 Executive Office of the Mayor. 2022. “Mayor Bowser Announces Application Launch for Grant Funding as Part of the District’s $41 Million Investment in High-Impact Tutoring.” Note that the total amount of the award has subsequently been reduced to about $39 million.
6 Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education. 2022. “Mayor Bowser Awards $3.19 Million to Support Organizations Providing High-Impact Tutoring to District Youth.”