The Problem with Scale

Our traditional K-12 public school system doesn’t know how to scale successful start-up programs well.

For example, small tutoring programs, started after the COVID-19 pandemic to catch kids up in their reading, writing, and problem-solving tasks, have struggled to grow to impact more kids.

Recently, The 74 reported that,

“As schools struggled to overcome the chaos and academic harm inflicted by COVID, many turned to tutoring as a simple, if sometimes costly, solution. By the end of 2023, the vast majority of states were funding tutoring programs, and by one estimate, at least $7.5 billion of federal relief funds were being directed to new offerings.”

“The flood of resources was backed by an extensive body of evidence. Dozens of studies conducted before the pandemic showed that the positive effects of tutoring were among the largest ever seen in education policy. To help a generation of young learners return to their pre-COVID trajectory, advocates argued, there appeared to be no strategy more effective than recruiting thousands of tutors to provide regular supplemental instruction.”

“But a report shared exclusively with The 74 raises doubts about whether the remarkable learning gains measured in prior studies can actually be produced by the kinds of large-scale initiatives that have been launched since 2020. …[T]he wide-ranging overview of over 250 high-quality studies finds that as tutoring programs grow, their impact steadily shrinks.”

“The findings, which are predominantly drawn from pre-COVID papers, dovetail with disappointing results of some local efforts that have been undertaken in the pandemic’s wake. They also reflect the well-acknowledged reality – observed throughout education research and the social sciences more generally – that the enormous benefits sometimes seen in highly controlled settings are seldom if ever carried over to larger populations.”

“Study author Matthew Kraft, an economist at Brown University who has enthusiastically supported the spread of tutoring, said that the promise of the approach should not be eclipsed by the ‘high, and sometimes outsized, expectations’ attached to it.”

“’We have to be realistic about how hard it is to do anything well in education out of the gate, let alone make fundamental changes to the core structures of teaching and learning,’ he said.”

“Prior estimates of the boost stemming form ‘high-impact’ tutoring, which emphasizes one-on-one or small-group instruction in large doses, have been sizable – about as much as an entire year of reading growth for elementary schoolers, and twice that seen by high school freshmen, as quantified through standardized test scores. By comparison, the advantages conferred to students in larger interventions ranged from one-third to one-half that magnitude.”

…

“Robert Balfanz, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, observed that the early hype promoting tutoring as a ‘silver bullet’ for COVID-related learning loss was destined to be deflated when school districts began leveraging them to reach thousands of struggling students. Still, he added, even high-enrollment efforts delivered important growth to children.”

“’This study just shows the reality that [tutoring] is a very effective intervention, but it’s going to take a lot of time and patience and learning to get it to work at scale,’ said Balfanz, who has contributed to the U.S. Department of Education’s effort to recruit 250,000 tutors and mentors to work in schools. ‘Even then, scale is always going to diminish what you can do for a smaller group.’”

The main culprit preventing a successful scaling of tutoring has to be talent. There just aren’t enough quality tutors, trained and interested in working for what districts are paying, around to scale programs to the degree that they will make a difference to large numbers of kids behind in their reading, writing, and problem-solving skills.

Another problem is where tutoring will occur within the traditional instructional day. If you don’t know this, be aware – the instructional day, both in elementary and secondary schools, is packed full of content already. Because of this, most tutoring that occurs in our traditional K-12 space happens either before or after school, or during breaks during the school day – like recess.

A final roadblock to making successful tutoring a constant in our traditional school system is that most districts don’t build tutoring programs into their annual budgets. Most of the tutoring that has happened in this country over the past four years was paid for by ESSER (The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funds. Those funds just vanished from school district budgets beginning this school year.

When I worked in the traditional system, I saw hundreds of programs (tutoring, reading programs, charter schools, career and technology programs, to name a few) that were extremely successful at a classroom or school level, but were never able to scale to the larger district. And forget about a program scaling nationally – that was rare to never.

This is one of the major problems with our traditional K-12 system today. We can’t figure out how to share successful learning ideas and programs with other kids who desperately need them. That’s a big reason why we need to invent a different system of learning for our kids.

Til tomorrow. SVB