It’s August! Time for back to school shopping and maybe a quick vacation with the family. Even though school starts here in Iowa August 23rd, the educational news the past few weeks has been rather slow. But there’s a few items to share today, so let’s get to it.
Ed Dept. Announces New Push to Expand Afterschool and Summer Program (The 74)
This article appeared in The 74 a couple weeks ago, July 14th to be exact. The article states:
“The U.S. Department of Education wants to make it easier for families to find high-quality summer and afterschool programs and for schools and local governments to use federal relief funds to pay for them.”
Our federal government must be focused on the summer of 2023 because this summer is basically over.
I hope our country can offer our young learners a national tutoring corps moving forward, but my experience tells me that program design is not what our federal government is skilled at doing.
We will see.
‘Like a Gut Punch’: Advocates Reel as Manchin Compromise Abandons Pre-K (The 74)
And this is exactly why we can’t depend on our federal government to implement quality program design.
According to The 74, “A year ago, Miriam Calderon was leading the U.S. Department of Education’s work in early-childhood, a time when $400 billion in new federal funding for programs serving young children still seemed within reach. Now she’s working on the outside, hoping Congress passes a bill with a small fraction of that amount.”
The article goes on to report “While the Senate once again inches closer to voting on what was originally President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, the recent compromise won’t include the $390 billion for child care and preschool and $190 for a child tax credit that the House passed last November. Biden campaigned on adding four more years to public education – two in preschool and two for free community college. So far, he’s had to back off both promises.”
We know early childhood education works for our kids, so the question we must ask ourselves is “why don’t we do what we know works?” And the answer to that my friends, at least in this case, is “politics.”
New Data: Despite Progress, a Third of Students Finished Year Below Grade Level (The 74)
Linda Jacobson, a reporter for The 74, reported yesterday that “Despite progress during the 2021-22 school year, over a third of student still fell below grade level by the time it ended, according to the latest federal data tracking schools’ response to the pandemic. Almost 90% of respondents to the latest School Pulse Panel survey from the National Center for Education Statistics blame pandemic-related disruptions, including quarantines and staff absences, for the lack of progress. But limited efforts to ramp up tutoring programs could also be a factor.”
Jacobson goes on to write “More than half of public schools reported using high-dosage tutoring to help students make up for lost learning, and many offered tutoring as part of summer learning and enrichment programs this year. But experts, including one charged with leading the U.S. Department of Education’s new effort to recruit 250,000 tutors and mentors, offered a degree of skepticism. Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University researcher overseeing the National Partnership for Student Success, said that many schools have made strong efforts to provide tutoring. But they also relied largely on teachers, who have been stretched thin because of staffing shortages.”
The 74 article goes on to report “A June review of spending plans in over 5,000 districts, from FutureEd at Georgetown University, showed that 1,258 districts planned to implement tutoring. Balfanz commented ‘I can believe that half of the schools attempted to provide tutoring and did so, at some scale, for some period of time. I think it’s unlikely that half of schools have and are sustaining high-dosage tutoring at the scale that is needed or beneficial.’”
Impactful tutoring depends on a quality individualized learning plan for the young learner and their tutors involved in the tutoring process.
Large governmental bodies are ill-equipped to lead such process.
Tutoring or Remediation: Which Learning Recovery Strategy is Most Popular? (EducationWeek)
This week EducationWeek reported “New federal data provide a glimpse into what strategies schools have used to support learning recovery, and which ones school leaders think are most effective. The results show that while some research-tested models – such as intensive tutoring – have become popular, other strategies touted by prominent education groups haven’t gained as much traction. And schools report that the learning recovery methods they have been using have had mixed effects. That may partly be because both student and staff quarantines and absences continued to disrupt time in classrooms this past year, and schools reported high levels of teacher burnout.”
There’s an old saying that suggests “you don’t know what you don’t know.” I’m afraid schools are falling prey to this saying as they try to figure out a way to “catch kids up” after more than two years of disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ability for schools to create innovative learning plans to help kids accelerate their learning is non-existent. Instead, they are relying on 20th century strategies like tutoring and remediation, crossing their fingers that these old-fashioned remedies might work once more.
We’ve seen above how our federal government has been slow to form tutoring services for our most needy students. Remediation is a slow, and often times non-successful, process.
Maybe 2022-23 is the year everyone “catches up.”
I doubt it.
Enjoy the weekend. It’s hot here in Iowa. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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