Tutoring Redux: How You Do Some Things Is How You Do Most Things.

Don’t miss this new package on the impact of enrollment on school finance from Bellwether, just released. 

On Monday I wrote about why Freddie deBoer is wrong about NCLB’s policy specifics, why that matters, and why you should read him anyway

Bonus recommendation: Read Dan Meyer on AI.

Today, I am re-upping a 2020 post and 2021 post that Mike Goldstein cited on LinkedIn, Dale Chu did on Twitter, and a few other people have mentioned to me with varying degrees of bemusement or despair. 

It’s related to this new work from Matthew Kraft that is getting a lot of attention. But I’m sharing for a different reason (though…the hacks who pushed back at the time for funding reasons…be better). There is this idea out there, it’s pervasive, that nothing works. Some people think that’s because we can’t expect a lot of kids to do well. Others because they think the system is hopelessly structured or broken. That’s wrong! Decline is a choice. Mediocrity is a choice. Policy is about choices. 

The number of policies that can enable better learning conditions, among them small schools, small classes, teacher evaluation, charter schools, and now tutoring, that are discredited because people won’t tell funders hard truths, foundation staff won’t tell principals hard truths, policymakers and funders make political compromises that erode effectiveness and fidelity, or we just do things in a slapdash fashion is discouraging. We should learn from rather than repeat that. 

(Related, and this is why Kraft’s work here is valuable, we should be evaluating actual initiatives, not funding streams.)

Anyhow, from October 2020:

Tutoring!

If you invest in the silver bullet market there is a buy opportunity coming in tutoring.  Not just any tutoring, high-dosage tutoring. The word itself sounds exciting – high-dosage!

It’s hard to miss a convergence around the idea that high-dosage tutoring is “the thing.” The research does favor it, Buzzy Hettleman lays out a good case here. (And the rich do it, which in 2020 makes it at once desirable and very bad).

Yet here is how these things tend to go: New idea – or not new but reintroduced idea – widely implemented through a funding and think piece gold rush. And widely implemented in uneven ways with little fidelity to the research because of the haste and good intentions coupled with lack of capacity around the field.

End result, good idea gets discredited because, on average, it shows little if any impact. You see this around the ed tech sector, class size, teacher evaluations, some reading initiatives, charter schools, teacher evaluation, are just some of the examples.

What all those ideas have in common with tutoring is a lot of promise. That’s all the more reason to be intentional, focus on equity, and not, to mix one more metaphor, spread everything around like peanut butter.

From March 2021:

For Tutoring The Best Of Times, And The Pretty Good Of Times, Too, But Some Risk…

If I put on my hat as someone who is concerned about the way the Covid school disruption, and Covid more generally, has disproportionally affected some students and communities then I see all the attention to tutoring pretty clearly one way: It’s an important remedy to help kids who need help, right now.

If I put on a different hat, as someone who wants to see good interventions, like tutoring, deployed as part of a more seamless and customized web of supports for kids, not just now but moving forward, then it’s different. In this case I see all the attention to tutoring and high-dosage tutoring as a mixed blessing.

Why? Hardly anyone doubts the efficacy of well-designed tutoring initiatives. Here’s a just released today study on that point (more from The 74 here). Rather, the issue is what happens if there is a gold rush or an effort to scale these programs rapidly or just do tutoring everywhere. When that happens in our sector, traditionally, a few things follow. First, fidelity to what makes something effective goes out the window. That’s obviously not a reason not to pursue an intervention that can help. It is, though, a reason to be intentional in crafting policy and rigorous about practice.

That’s because, second, usually the evaluations come back later and find no effect. This is because evaluating broad funding streams rarely turns up significant effects, we’re bad at thinking about differences in differences, and most fundamentally when you spread everything around you don’t get focus or efficacy. We saw this most recently on school turnarounds, where the overall results, and general discrediting of the idea, obscured some pretty important nuance about what worked and didn’t. Also small schools, a host of things around ELL and dual language, various curricular reforms, the list is long.

The so what? If you’re a tutoring advocate you should be excited, concerned, and probably most of all aware right now.

Recent, and not so recent, tutoring content: My caution on this, Goldstein Going Wild about tutoring, a Samuel Freedman tutoring story from back in the day, Slavin on tutoring risks and solutions, here comes the great Susanna Loeb!

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