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"slug": "make-a-sick-day-kit-for-cold-and-flu-season-before-your-household-gets-hit",
"title": "Make a 'Sick Day' Kit for Cold and Flu Season Before Your Household Gets Hit",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>Is your household ready if you get hit with a stomach bug tomorrow? Sniffles on Saturday? The flu in a month or two?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the United States, cold and flu season occurs in the fall and winter, starting in October and stretching all the way through May, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The combination of dropping temperatures and drier climates makes us more susceptible to common respiratory viruses like the common cold, the flu, RSV or COVID-19, and “back-to-back illnesses,” says \u003ca href=\"https://pedsdoctalk.com/\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>pediatrician Mona Amin\u003c/u>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Get ready now by creating a cold and flu prep kit. “Have things readily available so that you’re not scrambling or depending on someone else to run to the drugstore for you when you become sick,” says pharmacist \u003ca href=\"https://www.dralishareed.com/\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>Alisha Reed\u003c/u>\u003c/a>. That includes fever and pain relievers, hydration supplements and monitoring tools to help manage symptoms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many viruses and fevers can be managed at home, says Amin. And the common cold and the flu are viral infections, so they can’t be treated by prescription antibiotics anyway. \u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Below, you’ll find a list of items for the whole family, recommended by Amin and Reed. Put the products in one designated place, like a shelf in your medicine cabinet or a handy “sick day” box.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You’ll also want to take preventative measures like disinfecting frequently touched surfaces, getting vaccinated, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/16/1006651146/prevent-common-cold-flu-at-home#:~:text=Tip%20%231%3A%20Hang%20on%20to%20those%20masks\" target=\"_blank\">wearing masks\u003c/a> and washing your hands. But remember, says Reed, no prevention strategy is foolproof.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>What to include in your cold and flu prep kit\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Over-the-counter medications\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When you’re dealing with cough, congestion, sore throat, fever, fatigue or other common cold and flu symptoms, you may be tempted to reach for a medication that hits multiple symptoms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But those meds often include extra unnecessary ingredients that can sometimes put you at risk of accidentally overmedicating yourself, says Reed. Instead, opt for medications that target individual symptoms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These items all come with a price tag, of course. So if you don’t have something like a flexible spending account to help cover costs, consider purchasing your personal sick day must-haves to start, then building from there as you’re able.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Reed and Amin suggest these medications:\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pain relievers.\u003c/strong> Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen or naproxen can help relieve pain and discomfort from headaches, body aches and sore throats by reducing inflammation, says Reed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Don’t use children’s ibuprofen for children under 6 months old; naproxen is only approved for children 12 years and older.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Fever reducer.\u003c/strong> Medications like acetaminophen and ibuprofen can safely reduce body temperature, though \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/04/18/nx-s1-5254350/advil-tylenol-which-painkiller-take-when\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>acetaminophen is usually the better choice for fevers\u003c/u>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Look for a children’s version for 12 years and under. Be sure to follow \u003ca href=\"https://www.healthychildren.org/English/safety-prevention/at-home/medication-safety/Pages/Acetaminophen-for-Fever-and-Pain.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>this dosing chart \u003c/u>\u003c/a>when using children’s acetaminophen.\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For pregnant people: \u003c/strong>Acetaminophen is the \u003ca href=\"https://www.acog.org/clinical/guidance/practice-advisory/2025/09/acetaminophen-use-in-pregnancy-and-neurodevelopmental-outcomes\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>recommended OTC pain reliever for pregnant people\u003c/u>\u003c/a>, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Antihistamine\u003c/strong>. Yes, the same thing you take for spring allergies! Colds and allergies have similar symptoms like sneezing, runny noses and watery eyes, which is why they can both be treated by a histamine-blocking medication that can help dry up your sinuses.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids\u003c/strong>: Some OTC allergy medicines are approved for children as young as 6 months, but not all — and some have more side effects than others, says Amin. Check in with your care provider first if you have questions.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Decongestant\u003c/strong>. Pseudoephedrine pills or nasal spray can relieve a stuffy nose or sinus pressure by restricting blood vessels and opening airways in your nasal passages.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Pills are not recommended for kids under 4 and medicated sprays are not recommended for kids under 6.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Cough suppressant for a dry cough.\u003c/strong> Dextromethorphan — often referred to as “DM” on the cough syrup box — can temporarily suppress the signal in the brain that triggers your cough reflex, says Reed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids:\u003c/strong> Not recommended for children under 4; do not use for children under 2, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Cough expectorant for a congested cough\u003c/strong>. Guaifenesin may help relieve chest congestion by thinning mucus in your airways, says Reed. But before you buy, try just staying hydrated first. “Water is a natural expectorant,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Cough medicine is not recommended for children under 4; do not use for children under 2, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Read the label on the box or bottle of OTC products carefully to make sure that what you’re taking isn’t expired and will treat the ailment it’s intended for. And always stick to the recommended dosage and usage to avoid unnecessary risks or side effects, says Reed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Honey \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Honey is a great sick day remedy for all ages, but is especially helpful for small children not yet old enough for cough medicine, says Amin. “Honey is an anti-inflammatory that also helps with coating the throat, which can help with that cough trigger that children will have.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Note: honey isn’t safe for children under 12 months due to the risk of botulism.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Thermometer\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is a basic, must-have tool to check your temperature on those days you suspect you or your little one are running a fever, says Amin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Rectal thermometers are preferred for children 3 and under; oral and digital infrared thermometers are both fine choices for anyone older than that. (But oral thermometers are usually more accurate.)\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nasal saline treatment\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The dryness of winter can dehydrate your nasal passages and make it easier for viruses to attach and replicate in your nose and throat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One easy solution is to irrigate your nose with a saline spray or rinse, says Amin. This can be both preventative by helping to keep the mucous membranes in your nose moist, as well as symptom-relieving by loosening thick mucus if you have a cold.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Research even suggests that using saline drops at the first sign of a cold \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/09/240906141732.htm\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>can reduce symptoms in small children by up to two days\u003c/u>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Other comfort items\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chest rub.\u003c/strong> Vapor rubs containing combinations of camphor, eucalyptus and menthol oils may provide some relief for nighttime cough and cold symptoms when applied to the chest and neck. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Use with caution, says Amin. Though a lot of families use this homeopathic remedy, there’s not a lot of research supporting its effectiveness, and it can be harmful if used improperly. \u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11874951/\" target=\"_blank\">Vicks VapoRub\u003c/a>, for example, should be applied only to the chest and throat and never heated up. And be sure to check age restrictions before using any products on children — baby and child chest rubs will be formulated with gentler ingredients.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Disposable vomit bags. \u003c/strong>These are useful to have, easy to store and a great replacement for sitting by the toilet if the stomach flu should hit your house this year, says Amin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Humidifier.\u003c/strong> A humidifier adds moisture to the air, which can help loosen mucus stuck in your sinuses. Reed suggests using a cool-mist humidifier when sick, which can help ease stuffiness during a cold.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pedialyte, apple juice, water, Gatorade. \u003c/strong>Diarrhea or vomiting, common symptoms of the flu or COVID-19, can sometimes lead to dehydration. Make sure to have a few favorite drinks handy that can help replace those lost liquids for you or your little one, Amin says.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">When to call your doctor \u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As long as your symptoms are improving — and responding to treatment — many viruses can be dealt with from the comfort of your home.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>However, if you’re seeing these concerning symptoms, reach out to your doctor.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>A fever in infants younger than 3 months; above 102 F for children; 103 F for adults; or any high fevers that last longer than 1-2 days and/or don’t respond to fever-reducing medicine. \u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>Shortness of breath or erratic breathing\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>Extreme thirst, inability to drink liquids, trouble urinating or producing tears, dark urine, severe or persistent vomiting\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>Confusion, disorientation, extreme irritability or weakness\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These aren’t the only signs to look for, so when in doubt, reach out, says Reed. “Don’t be afraid to call your doctor or talk to a pharmacist about what’s going on. It doesn’t hurt to double check,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003chr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity\"/>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is CJ Riculan.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>We’d love to hear from you. Email us at LifeKit@npr.org. Listen to Life Kit on\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://n.pr/3LdRb0X\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cem> Apple Podcasts\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://n.pr/3K3xVln\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cem> Spotify\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, and sign up for our\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://n.pr/3xN1tB9\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cem> newsletter\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Get ready now by creating a cold and flu prep kit. “Have things readily available so that you’re not scrambling or depending on someone else to run to the drugstore for you when you become sick,” says pharmacist \u003ca href=\"https://www.dralishareed.com/\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>Alisha Reed\u003c/u>\u003c/a>. That includes fever and pain relievers, hydration supplements and monitoring tools to help manage symptoms.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Many viruses and fevers can be managed at home, says Amin. And the common cold and the flu are viral infections, so they can’t be treated by prescription antibiotics anyway. \u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Many viruses and fevers can be managed at home, says Amin. And the common cold and the flu are viral infections, so they can’t be treated by prescription antibiotics anyway. \u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Below, you’ll find a list of items for the whole family, recommended by Amin and Reed. Put the products in one designated place, like a shelf in your medicine cabinet or a handy “sick day” box.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You’ll also want to take preventative measures like disinfecting frequently touched surfaces, getting vaccinated, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/16/1006651146/prevent-common-cold-flu-at-home#:~:text=Tip%20%231%3A%20Hang%20on%20to%20those%20masks\" target=\"_blank\">wearing masks\u003c/a> and washing your hands. But remember, says Reed, no prevention strategy is foolproof.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You’ll also want to take preventative measures like disinfecting frequently touched surfaces, getting vaccinated, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/16/1006651146/prevent-common-cold-flu-at-home#:~:text=Tip%20%231%3A%20Hang%20on%20to%20those%20masks\" target=\"_blank\">wearing masks\u003c/a> and washing your hands. But remember, says Reed, no prevention strategy is foolproof.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Over-the-counter medications\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>When you’re dealing with cough, congestion, sore throat, fever, fatigue or other common cold and flu symptoms, you may be tempted to reach for a medication that hits multiple symptoms.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But those meds often include extra unnecessary ingredients that can sometimes put you at risk of accidentally overmedicating yourself, says Reed. Instead, opt for medications that target individual symptoms.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>These items all come with a price tag, of course. So if you don’t have something like a flexible spending account to help cover costs, consider purchasing your personal sick day must-haves to start, then building from there as you’re able.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>These items all come with a price tag, of course. So if you don’t have something like a flexible spending account to help cover costs, consider purchasing your personal sick day must-haves to start, then building from there as you’re able.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pain relievers.\u003c/strong> Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen or naproxen can help relieve pain and discomfort from headaches, body aches and sore throats by reducing inflammation, says Reed.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Don’t use children’s ibuprofen for children under 6 months old; naproxen is only approved for children 12 years and older.\u003c/li>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Fever reducer.\u003c/strong> Medications like acetaminophen and ibuprofen can safely reduce body temperature, though \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/04/18/nx-s1-5254350/advil-tylenol-which-painkiller-take-when\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>acetaminophen is usually the better choice for fevers\u003c/u>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Fever reducer.\u003c/strong> Medications like acetaminophen and ibuprofen can safely reduce body temperature, though \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/04/18/nx-s1-5254350/advil-tylenol-which-painkiller-take-when\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>acetaminophen is usually the better choice for fevers\u003c/u>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Look for a children’s version for 12 years and under. Be sure to follow \u003ca href=\"https://www.healthychildren.org/English/safety-prevention/at-home/medication-safety/Pages/Acetaminophen-for-Fever-and-Pain.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>this dosing chart \u003c/u>\u003c/a>when using children’s acetaminophen.\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Look for a children’s version for 12 years and under. Be sure to follow \u003ca href=\"https://www.healthychildren.org/English/safety-prevention/at-home/medication-safety/Pages/Acetaminophen-for-Fever-and-Pain.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>this dosing chart \u003c/u>\u003c/a>when using children’s acetaminophen.\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For pregnant people: \u003c/strong>Acetaminophen is the \u003ca href=\"https://www.acog.org/clinical/guidance/practice-advisory/2025/09/acetaminophen-use-in-pregnancy-and-neurodevelopmental-outcomes\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>recommended OTC pain reliever for pregnant people\u003c/u>\u003c/a>, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.\u003c/li>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For pregnant people: \u003c/strong>Acetaminophen is the \u003ca href=\"https://www.acog.org/clinical/guidance/practice-advisory/2025/09/acetaminophen-use-in-pregnancy-and-neurodevelopmental-outcomes\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>recommended OTC pain reliever for pregnant people\u003c/u>\u003c/a>, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Antihistamine\u003c/strong>. Yes, the same thing you take for spring allergies! Colds and allergies have similar symptoms like sneezing, runny noses and watery eyes, which is why they can both be treated by a histamine-blocking medication that can help dry up your sinuses.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Antihistamine\u003c/strong>. Yes, the same thing you take for spring allergies! Colds and allergies have similar symptoms like sneezing, runny noses and watery eyes, which is why they can both be treated by a histamine-blocking medication that can help dry up your sinuses.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids\u003c/strong>: Some OTC allergy medicines are approved for children as young as 6 months, but not all — and some have more side effects than others, says Amin. Check in with your care provider first if you have questions.\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids\u003c/strong>: Some OTC allergy medicines are approved for children as young as 6 months, but not all — and some have more side effects than others, says Amin. Check in with your care provider first if you have questions.\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Decongestant\u003c/strong>. Pseudoephedrine pills or nasal spray can relieve a stuffy nose or sinus pressure by restricting blood vessels and opening airways in your nasal passages.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Decongestant\u003c/strong>. Pseudoephedrine pills or nasal spray can relieve a stuffy nose or sinus pressure by restricting blood vessels and opening airways in your nasal passages.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Pills are not recommended for kids under 4 and medicated sprays are not recommended for kids under 6.\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Pills are not recommended for kids under 4 and medicated sprays are not recommended for kids under 6.\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Cough suppressant for a dry cough.\u003c/strong> Dextromethorphan — often referred to as “DM” on the cough syrup box — can temporarily suppress the signal in the brain that triggers your cough reflex, says Reed.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Cough suppressant for a dry cough.\u003c/strong> Dextromethorphan — often referred to as “DM” on the cough syrup box — can temporarily suppress the signal in the brain that triggers your cough reflex, says Reed.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids:\u003c/strong> Not recommended for children under 4; do not use for children under 2, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids:\u003c/strong> Not recommended for children under 4; do not use for children under 2, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Cough expectorant for a congested cough\u003c/strong>. Guaifenesin may help relieve chest congestion by thinning mucus in your airways, says Reed. But before you buy, try just staying hydrated first. “Water is a natural expectorant,” she says.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Cough expectorant for a congested cough\u003c/strong>. Guaifenesin may help relieve chest congestion by thinning mucus in your airways, says Reed. But before you buy, try just staying hydrated first. “Water is a natural expectorant,” she says.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Cough medicine is not recommended for children under 4; do not use for children under 2, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.\u003c/li>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Cough medicine is not recommended for children under 4; do not use for children under 2, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Read the label on the box or bottle of OTC products carefully to make sure that what you’re taking isn’t expired and will treat the ailment it’s intended for. And always stick to the recommended dosage and usage to avoid unnecessary risks or side effects, says Reed.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Read the label on the box or bottle of OTC products carefully to make sure that what you’re taking isn’t expired and will treat the ailment it’s intended for. And always stick to the recommended dosage and usage to avoid unnecessary risks or side effects, says Reed.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Honey \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Honey is a great sick day remedy for all ages, but is especially helpful for small children not yet old enough for cough medicine, says Amin. “Honey is an anti-inflammatory that also helps with coating the throat, which can help with that cough trigger that children will have.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Honey is a great sick day remedy for all ages, but is especially helpful for small children not yet old enough for cough medicine, says Amin. “Honey is an anti-inflammatory that also helps with coating the throat, which can help with that cough trigger that children will have.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Note: honey isn’t safe for children under 12 months due to the risk of botulism.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Note: honey isn’t safe for children under 12 months due to the risk of botulism.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Thermometer\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is a basic, must-have tool to check your temperature on those days you suspect you or your little one are running a fever, says Amin.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>This is a basic, must-have tool to check your temperature on those days you suspect you or your little one are running a fever, says Amin.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Rectal thermometers are preferred for children 3 and under; oral and digital infrared thermometers are both fine choices for anyone older than that. (But oral thermometers are usually more accurate.)\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Rectal thermometers are preferred for children 3 and under; oral and digital infrared thermometers are both fine choices for anyone older than that. (But oral thermometers are usually more accurate.)\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nasal saline treatment\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nasal saline treatment\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The dryness of winter can dehydrate your nasal passages and make it easier for viruses to attach and replicate in your nose and throat.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>The dryness of winter can dehydrate your nasal passages and make it easier for viruses to attach and replicate in your nose and throat.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>One easy solution is to irrigate your nose with a saline spray or rinse, says Amin. This can be both preventative by helping to keep the mucous membranes in your nose moist, as well as symptom-relieving by loosening thick mucus if you have a cold.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>One easy solution is to irrigate your nose with a saline spray or rinse, says Amin. This can be both preventative by helping to keep the mucous membranes in your nose moist, as well as symptom-relieving by loosening thick mucus if you have a cold.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Research even suggests that using saline drops at the first sign of a cold \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/09/240906141732.htm\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>can reduce symptoms in small children by up to two days\u003c/u>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Research even suggests that using saline drops at the first sign of a cold \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/09/240906141732.htm\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>can reduce symptoms in small children by up to two days\u003c/u>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Other comfort items\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Other comfort items\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chest rub.\u003c/strong> Vapor rubs containing combinations of camphor, eucalyptus and menthol oils may provide some relief for nighttime cough and cold symptoms when applied to the chest and neck. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chest rub.\u003c/strong> Vapor rubs containing combinations of camphor, eucalyptus and menthol oils may provide some relief for nighttime cough and cold symptoms when applied to the chest and neck. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Use with caution, says Amin. Though a lot of families use this homeopathic remedy, there’s not a lot of research supporting its effectiveness, and it can be harmful if used improperly. \u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11874951/\" target=\"_blank\">Vicks VapoRub\u003c/a>, for example, should be applied only to the chest and throat and never heated up. And be sure to check age restrictions before using any products on children — baby and child chest rubs will be formulated with gentler ingredients.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Use with caution, says Amin. Though a lot of families use this homeopathic remedy, there’s not a lot of research supporting its effectiveness, and it can be harmful if used improperly. \u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11874951/\" target=\"_blank\">Vicks VapoRub\u003c/a>, for example, should be applied only to the chest and throat and never heated up. And be sure to check age restrictions before using any products on children — baby and child chest rubs will be formulated with gentler ingredients.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Disposable vomit bags. \u003c/strong>These are useful to have, easy to store and a great replacement for sitting by the toilet if the stomach flu should hit your house this year, says Amin.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Disposable vomit bags. \u003c/strong>These are useful to have, easy to store and a great replacement for sitting by the toilet if the stomach flu should hit your house this year, says Amin.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Humidifier.\u003c/strong> A humidifier adds moisture to the air, which can help loosen mucus stuck in your sinuses. Reed suggests using a cool-mist humidifier when sick, which can help ease stuffiness during a cold.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Humidifier.\u003c/strong> A humidifier adds moisture to the air, which can help loosen mucus stuck in your sinuses. Reed suggests using a cool-mist humidifier when sick, which can help ease stuffiness during a cold.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pedialyte, apple juice, water, Gatorade. \u003c/strong>Diarrhea or vomiting, common symptoms of the flu or COVID-19, can sometimes lead to dehydration. Make sure to have a few favorite drinks handy that can help replace those lost liquids for you or your little one, Amin says.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pedialyte, apple juice, water, Gatorade. \u003c/strong>Diarrhea or vomiting, common symptoms of the flu or COVID-19, can sometimes lead to dehydration. Make sure to have a few favorite drinks handy that can help replace those lost liquids for you or your little one, Amin says.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>As long as your symptoms are improving — and responding to treatment — many viruses can be dealt with from the comfort of your home.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>As long as your symptoms are improving — and responding to treatment — many viruses can be dealt with from the comfort of your home.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>However, if you’re seeing these concerning symptoms, reach out to your doctor.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>A fever in infants younger than 3 months; above 102 F for children; 103 F for adults; or any high fevers that last longer than 1-2 days and/or don’t respond to fever-reducing medicine. \u003c/li>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>Shortness of breath or erratic breathing\u003c/li>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>Extreme thirst, inability to drink liquids, trouble urinating or producing tears, dark urine, severe or persistent vomiting\u003c/li>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>Confusion, disorientation, extreme irritability or weakness\u003c/li>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>These aren’t the only signs to look for, so when in doubt, reach out, says Reed. “Don’t be afraid to call your doctor or talk to a pharmacist about what’s going on. It doesn’t hurt to double check,” she says.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>These aren’t the only signs to look for, so when in doubt, reach out, says Reed. “Don’t be afraid to call your doctor or talk to a pharmacist about what’s going on. It doesn’t hurt to double check,” she says.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is CJ Riculan.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Cold and flu season is here. Before someone in your household gets hit, make sure you have these essential meds and comfort items in your medicine cabinet. ",
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"title": "Make a 'Sick Day' Kit for Cold and Flu Season Before Your Household Gets Hit | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>Is your household ready if you get hit with a stomach bug tomorrow? Sniffles on Saturday? The flu in a month or two?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the United States, cold and flu season occurs in the fall and winter, starting in October and stretching all the way through May, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The combination of dropping temperatures and drier climates makes us more susceptible to common respiratory viruses like the common cold, the flu, RSV or COVID-19, and “back-to-back illnesses,” says \u003ca href=\"https://pedsdoctalk.com/\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>pediatrician Mona Amin\u003c/u>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Get ready now by creating a cold and flu prep kit. “Have things readily available so that you’re not scrambling or depending on someone else to run to the drugstore for you when you become sick,” says pharmacist \u003ca href=\"https://www.dralishareed.com/\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>Alisha Reed\u003c/u>\u003c/a>. That includes fever and pain relievers, hydration supplements and monitoring tools to help manage symptoms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many viruses and fevers can be managed at home, says Amin. And the common cold and the flu are viral infections, so they can’t be treated by prescription antibiotics anyway. \u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Below, you’ll find a list of items for the whole family, recommended by Amin and Reed. Put the products in one designated place, like a shelf in your medicine cabinet or a handy “sick day” box.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You’ll also want to take preventative measures like disinfecting frequently touched surfaces, getting vaccinated, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/16/1006651146/prevent-common-cold-flu-at-home#:~:text=Tip%20%231%3A%20Hang%20on%20to%20those%20masks\" target=\"_blank\">wearing masks\u003c/a> and washing your hands. But remember, says Reed, no prevention strategy is foolproof.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>What to include in your cold and flu prep kit\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Over-the-counter medications\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When you’re dealing with cough, congestion, sore throat, fever, fatigue or other common cold and flu symptoms, you may be tempted to reach for a medication that hits multiple symptoms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But those meds often include extra unnecessary ingredients that can sometimes put you at risk of accidentally overmedicating yourself, says Reed. Instead, opt for medications that target individual symptoms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These items all come with a price tag, of course. So if you don’t have something like a flexible spending account to help cover costs, consider purchasing your personal sick day must-haves to start, then building from there as you’re able.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Reed and Amin suggest these medications:\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pain relievers.\u003c/strong> Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen or naproxen can help relieve pain and discomfort from headaches, body aches and sore throats by reducing inflammation, says Reed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Don’t use children’s ibuprofen for children under 6 months old; naproxen is only approved for children 12 years and older.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Fever reducer.\u003c/strong> Medications like acetaminophen and ibuprofen can safely reduce body temperature, though \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/04/18/nx-s1-5254350/advil-tylenol-which-painkiller-take-when\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>acetaminophen is usually the better choice for fevers\u003c/u>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Look for a children’s version for 12 years and under. Be sure to follow \u003ca href=\"https://www.healthychildren.org/English/safety-prevention/at-home/medication-safety/Pages/Acetaminophen-for-Fever-and-Pain.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>this dosing chart \u003c/u>\u003c/a>when using children’s acetaminophen.\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For pregnant people: \u003c/strong>Acetaminophen is the \u003ca href=\"https://www.acog.org/clinical/guidance/practice-advisory/2025/09/acetaminophen-use-in-pregnancy-and-neurodevelopmental-outcomes\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>recommended OTC pain reliever for pregnant people\u003c/u>\u003c/a>, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Antihistamine\u003c/strong>. Yes, the same thing you take for spring allergies! Colds and allergies have similar symptoms like sneezing, runny noses and watery eyes, which is why they can both be treated by a histamine-blocking medication that can help dry up your sinuses.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids\u003c/strong>: Some OTC allergy medicines are approved for children as young as 6 months, but not all — and some have more side effects than others, says Amin. Check in with your care provider first if you have questions.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Decongestant\u003c/strong>. Pseudoephedrine pills or nasal spray can relieve a stuffy nose or sinus pressure by restricting blood vessels and opening airways in your nasal passages.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Pills are not recommended for kids under 4 and medicated sprays are not recommended for kids under 6.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Cough suppressant for a dry cough.\u003c/strong> Dextromethorphan — often referred to as “DM” on the cough syrup box — can temporarily suppress the signal in the brain that triggers your cough reflex, says Reed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids:\u003c/strong> Not recommended for children under 4; do not use for children under 2, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Cough expectorant for a congested cough\u003c/strong>. Guaifenesin may help relieve chest congestion by thinning mucus in your airways, says Reed. But before you buy, try just staying hydrated first. “Water is a natural expectorant,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>For kids: \u003c/strong>Cough medicine is not recommended for children under 4; do not use for children under 2, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Read the label on the box or bottle of OTC products carefully to make sure that what you’re taking isn’t expired and will treat the ailment it’s intended for. And always stick to the recommended dosage and usage to avoid unnecessary risks or side effects, says Reed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Honey \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Honey is a great sick day remedy for all ages, but is especially helpful for small children not yet old enough for cough medicine, says Amin. “Honey is an anti-inflammatory that also helps with coating the throat, which can help with that cough trigger that children will have.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Note: honey isn’t safe for children under 12 months due to the risk of botulism.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Thermometer\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is a basic, must-have tool to check your temperature on those days you suspect you or your little one are running a fever, says Amin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Rectal thermometers are preferred for children 3 and under; oral and digital infrared thermometers are both fine choices for anyone older than that. (But oral thermometers are usually more accurate.)\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nasal saline treatment\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The dryness of winter can dehydrate your nasal passages and make it easier for viruses to attach and replicate in your nose and throat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One easy solution is to irrigate your nose with a saline spray or rinse, says Amin. This can be both preventative by helping to keep the mucous membranes in your nose moist, as well as symptom-relieving by loosening thick mucus if you have a cold.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Research even suggests that using saline drops at the first sign of a cold \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/09/240906141732.htm\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cu>can reduce symptoms in small children by up to two days\u003c/u>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Other comfort items\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chest rub.\u003c/strong> Vapor rubs containing combinations of camphor, eucalyptus and menthol oils may provide some relief for nighttime cough and cold symptoms when applied to the chest and neck. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Use with caution, says Amin. Though a lot of families use this homeopathic remedy, there’s not a lot of research supporting its effectiveness, and it can be harmful if used improperly. \u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11874951/\" target=\"_blank\">Vicks VapoRub\u003c/a>, for example, should be applied only to the chest and throat and never heated up. And be sure to check age restrictions before using any products on children — baby and child chest rubs will be formulated with gentler ingredients.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Disposable vomit bags. \u003c/strong>These are useful to have, easy to store and a great replacement for sitting by the toilet if the stomach flu should hit your house this year, says Amin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Humidifier.\u003c/strong> A humidifier adds moisture to the air, which can help loosen mucus stuck in your sinuses. Reed suggests using a cool-mist humidifier when sick, which can help ease stuffiness during a cold.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pedialyte, apple juice, water, Gatorade. \u003c/strong>Diarrhea or vomiting, common symptoms of the flu or COVID-19, can sometimes lead to dehydration. Make sure to have a few favorite drinks handy that can help replace those lost liquids for you or your little one, Amin says.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">When to call your doctor \u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As long as your symptoms are improving — and responding to treatment — many viruses can be dealt with from the comfort of your home.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>However, if you’re seeing these concerning symptoms, reach out to your doctor.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>A fever in infants younger than 3 months; above 102 F for children; 103 F for adults; or any high fevers that last longer than 1-2 days and/or don’t respond to fever-reducing medicine. \u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>Shortness of breath or erratic breathing\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>Extreme thirst, inability to drink liquids, trouble urinating or producing tears, dark urine, severe or persistent vomiting\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>Confusion, disorientation, extreme irritability or weakness\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These aren’t the only signs to look for, so when in doubt, reach out, says Reed. “Don’t be afraid to call your doctor or talk to a pharmacist about what’s going on. It doesn’t hurt to double check,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003chr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity\"/>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is CJ Riculan.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>We’d love to hear from you. Email us at LifeKit@npr.org. Listen to Life Kit on\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://n.pr/3LdRb0X\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cem> Apple Podcasts\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://n.pr/3K3xVln\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cem> Spotify\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, and sign up for our\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://n.pr/3xN1tB9\" target=\"_blank\">\u003cem> newsletter\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "can-tutoring-at-scale-lead-to-academic-recovery-one-advocates-new-study-yields-underwhelming-results",
"title": "Can Tutoring at Scale Lead to Academic Recovery? One Advocate's New Study Yields Underwhelming Results",
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"headTitle": "Can Tutoring at Scale Lead to Academic Recovery? One Advocate’s New Study Yields Underwhelming Results | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, was an \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/getting-tutoring-right-to-reduce-covid-19-learning-loss/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">early proponent\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> of giving tutors — ordinarily a luxury for the rich — to the masses after the pandemic. The research evidence was strong; more than a hundred studies had shown remarkable academic gains for students who were frequently tutored every week at school. Sometimes, they caught up two grade levels in a single year. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">After COVID-19 shuttered schools in the spring of 2020, Kraft along with a small group of academics lobbied the Biden administration to urge schools to invest in this kind of intensive tutoring across the nation to help students catch up from pandemic learning losses. \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/spp/results.asp#tutoring-may24-chart-1.\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Many schools did\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — or tried to do so. Now, in a moment of scholarly honesty and reflection, Kraft has produced a study showing that tutoring the masses isn’t so easy — even with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64123/pandemic-aid-to-schools-paid-off-but-we-dont-know-how\">billions of dollars from Uncle Sam\u003c/a>. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The study, which was posted online in \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-1030\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">late August 2024\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, 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.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“These results are not as large as many in the education sector had hoped,” said Kraft in an interview. That’s something of an academic understatement. The one and only positive result for students was a tiny fraction of what earlier tutoring studies had found.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“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.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Going forward, Kraft said he and other researchers need to “recalibrate” or adjust expectations around the “eye-popping” or very large impacts that previous small-scale tutoring programs have achieved.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kraft described the Nashville program as “multiple orders of magnitude” larger than the pre-COVID tutoring studies. Those were often less than 50 students, while some involved a few hundred. Only a handful included over 1,000 students. Nashville’s tutoring program reached almost 7,000 students, roughly 10% of the district’s student population. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/takeaways-from-research-on-tutoring-to-address-coronavirus-learning-loss/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tennessee was a trailblazer\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in tutoring after the pandemic. State lawmakers appropriated \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tn.gov/education/tn-all-corps.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">extra funding\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> to schools to launch large tutoring programs, even before the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/07/05/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-launches-national-effort-to-support-student-success/?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Biden administration urged\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> schools around the nation to do the same with their federal COVID recovery funds. Nashville partnered with researchers, including Kraft, to study its ramp up and outcomes for students to help advise on improvements along the way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meanwhile, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64197/new-studies-of-online-tutoring-highlight-troubles-with-attendance-and-larger-tutoring-groups\">remote tutors\u003c/a> 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. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. (See the graph below.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“What’s most important is that we figure out what tutoring programs and design features work best for which students,” Kraft said. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Average students in the middle of the achievement distribution gained the most from Nashville’s tutoring program, while students who were the most behind did not catch up much\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64629\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 780px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-64629 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/09/image1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"780\" height=\"308\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/09/image1.png 780w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/09/image1-160x63.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/09/image1-768x303.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: Kraft, Matthew A., Danielle Sanderson Edwards, and Marisa Cannata. (2024). The Scaling Dynamics and Causal Effects of a District-Operated Tutoring Program.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another reason for the disappointing academic gains from tutoring may be related to the individualized attention that many students were also receiving at Nashville’s schools. Tutoring often took place during frequently scheduled periods of “Personalized Learning Time” for students, and even students not selected for tutoring received other instruction during this period, such as small-group work with a teacher or individual services for children with special needs. Another set of students was assigned independent practice work using advanced educational software that adapts to a student’s level. To demonstrate positive results in this study, tutoring would have had to outperform all these other interventions. It’s possible that these other interventions are as powerful as tutoring. Earlier pre-COVID studies of tutoring generally compared the gains against those of students who had nothing more than traditional whole class instruction. That’s a starker comparison. (To be sure, one would still have hoped to see stronger results for tutoring as the Nashville program migrated to outside of school hours; students who received both tutoring and personalized learning time should have meaningfully outperformed students who had only the personalized learning time.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other post-pandemic tutoring research has been rosier. A\u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/1wkbCQWOVBTlJGNpcPhpCGWLaF?domain=educationlab.uchicago.edu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> smaller study of frequent in-school tutoring in Chicago and Atlanta\u003c/a>, released in March 2024, found giant gains for students in math, enough to totally undo learning losses for the average student. However, those results were achieved by only three-quarters of the roughly 800 students who had been assigned to receive tutoring and actually attended sessions.*\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kraft argued that schools should not abandon tutoring just because it’s not a silver bullet for academic recovery after COVID. “I worry,” he said, “that we may excuse ourselves from the hard work of iterative experimentation and continuous improvement by saying that we didn’t get the eye-popping results that we had hoped for right out of the gate, and therefore it’s not the solution that we should continue to invest in.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Iteratively is how the business world innovates too. I’m a former business reporter, and this rocky effort to bring tutoring to schools reminds me of how Levi’s introduced custom-made jeans for the masses in the 1990s. These “personal pairs” didn’t cost much more than traditional mass-produced jeans, but it was time consuming for clerks to take measurements, often the jeans didn’t fit and reorders were a hassle. Levi’s \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mass-customization.blogs.com/mass_customization_open_i/2005/12/repost_analysis.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">pulled the plug\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in 2003. Eventually it brought back custom jeans — truly bespoke ones made by a master tailor at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.levistrauss.com/2013/09/23/sewing-secret-master-tailor/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">$750\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> or more a pop. For the masses? Maybe not. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I wonder if customized instruction can be accomplished at scale at an affordable price. To really help students who are behind, tutors will need to diagnose each student’s learning gaps, and then develop a customized learning plan for each student. That’s pricey, and maybe impossible to do for millions of students all over the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tutoring-research-nashville/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">tutoring research\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>*Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated how many students were assigned to receive tutoring in the Chicago and Atlanta experiment. Only 784 students were to be tutored out of 1,540 students in the study. About three-quarters of those 784 students received tutoring. The sentence was also revised to clarify which students’ math outcomes drove the results.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"title": "Can Tutoring at Scale Lead to Academic Recovery? One Advocate's New Study Yields Underwhelming Results | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, was an \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/getting-tutoring-right-to-reduce-covid-19-learning-loss/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">early proponent\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> of giving tutors — ordinarily a luxury for the rich — to the masses after the pandemic. The research evidence was strong; more than a hundred studies had shown remarkable academic gains for students who were frequently tutored every week at school. Sometimes, they caught up two grade levels in a single year. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">After COVID-19 shuttered schools in the spring of 2020, Kraft along with a small group of academics lobbied the Biden administration to urge schools to invest in this kind of intensive tutoring across the nation to help students catch up from pandemic learning losses. \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/spp/results.asp#tutoring-may24-chart-1.\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Many schools did\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — or tried to do so. Now, in a moment of scholarly honesty and reflection, Kraft has produced a study showing that tutoring the masses isn’t so easy — even with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64123/pandemic-aid-to-schools-paid-off-but-we-dont-know-how\">billions of dollars from Uncle Sam\u003c/a>. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The study, which was posted online in \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-1030\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">late August 2024\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, 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.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“These results are not as large as many in the education sector had hoped,” said Kraft in an interview. That’s something of an academic understatement. The one and only positive result for students was a tiny fraction of what earlier tutoring studies had found.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“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.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Going forward, Kraft said he and other researchers need to “recalibrate” or adjust expectations around the “eye-popping” or very large impacts that previous small-scale tutoring programs have achieved.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kraft described the Nashville program as “multiple orders of magnitude” larger than the pre-COVID tutoring studies. Those were often less than 50 students, while some involved a few hundred. Only a handful included over 1,000 students. Nashville’s tutoring program reached almost 7,000 students, roughly 10% of the district’s student population. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/takeaways-from-research-on-tutoring-to-address-coronavirus-learning-loss/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tennessee was a trailblazer\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in tutoring after the pandemic. State lawmakers appropriated \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tn.gov/education/tn-all-corps.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">extra funding\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> to schools to launch large tutoring programs, even before the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/07/05/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-launches-national-effort-to-support-student-success/?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Biden administration urged\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> schools around the nation to do the same with their federal COVID recovery funds. Nashville partnered with researchers, including Kraft, to study its ramp up and outcomes for students to help advise on improvements along the way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meanwhile, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64197/new-studies-of-online-tutoring-highlight-troubles-with-attendance-and-larger-tutoring-groups\">remote tutors\u003c/a> 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. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. (See the graph below.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“What’s most important is that we figure out what tutoring programs and design features work best for which students,” Kraft said. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Average students in the middle of the achievement distribution gained the most from Nashville’s tutoring program, while students who were the most behind did not catch up much\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64629\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 780px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-64629 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/09/image1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"780\" height=\"308\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/09/image1.png 780w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/09/image1-160x63.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/09/image1-768x303.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: Kraft, Matthew A., Danielle Sanderson Edwards, and Marisa Cannata. (2024). The Scaling Dynamics and Causal Effects of a District-Operated Tutoring Program.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another reason for the disappointing academic gains from tutoring may be related to the individualized attention that many students were also receiving at Nashville’s schools. Tutoring often took place during frequently scheduled periods of “Personalized Learning Time” for students, and even students not selected for tutoring received other instruction during this period, such as small-group work with a teacher or individual services for children with special needs. Another set of students was assigned independent practice work using advanced educational software that adapts to a student’s level. To demonstrate positive results in this study, tutoring would have had to outperform all these other interventions. It’s possible that these other interventions are as powerful as tutoring. Earlier pre-COVID studies of tutoring generally compared the gains against those of students who had nothing more than traditional whole class instruction. That’s a starker comparison. (To be sure, one would still have hoped to see stronger results for tutoring as the Nashville program migrated to outside of school hours; students who received both tutoring and personalized learning time should have meaningfully outperformed students who had only the personalized learning time.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other post-pandemic tutoring research has been rosier. A\u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/1wkbCQWOVBTlJGNpcPhpCGWLaF?domain=educationlab.uchicago.edu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> smaller study of frequent in-school tutoring in Chicago and Atlanta\u003c/a>, released in March 2024, found giant gains for students in math, enough to totally undo learning losses for the average student. However, those results were achieved by only three-quarters of the roughly 800 students who had been assigned to receive tutoring and actually attended sessions.*\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kraft argued that schools should not abandon tutoring just because it’s not a silver bullet for academic recovery after COVID. “I worry,” he said, “that we may excuse ourselves from the hard work of iterative experimentation and continuous improvement by saying that we didn’t get the eye-popping results that we had hoped for right out of the gate, and therefore it’s not the solution that we should continue to invest in.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Iteratively is how the business world innovates too. I’m a former business reporter, and this rocky effort to bring tutoring to schools reminds me of how Levi’s introduced custom-made jeans for the masses in the 1990s. These “personal pairs” didn’t cost much more than traditional mass-produced jeans, but it was time consuming for clerks to take measurements, often the jeans didn’t fit and reorders were a hassle. Levi’s \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mass-customization.blogs.com/mass_customization_open_i/2005/12/repost_analysis.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">pulled the plug\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in 2003. Eventually it brought back custom jeans — truly bespoke ones made by a master tailor at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.levistrauss.com/2013/09/23/sewing-secret-master-tailor/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">$750\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> or more a pop. For the masses? Maybe not. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I wonder if customized instruction can be accomplished at scale at an affordable price. To really help students who are behind, tutors will need to diagnose each student’s learning gaps, and then develop a customized learning plan for each student. That’s pricey, and maybe impossible to do for millions of students all over the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tutoring-research-nashville/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">tutoring research\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>*Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated how many students were assigned to receive tutoring in the Chicago and Atlanta experiment. Only 784 students were to be tutored out of 1,540 students in the study. About three-quarters of those 784 students received tutoring. The sentence was also revised to clarify which students’ math outcomes drove the results.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ever since the pandemic shut down schools in the spring of 2020, education researchers have pointed to tutoring as the most promising way to help kids catch up academically. Evidence from \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27476/w27476.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">almost 100 studies\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was overwhelming for a particular kind of tutoring, called high-dosage tutoring, where students focus on either reading or math three to five times a week.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But until recently, there has been little good evidence for the effectiveness of online tutoring, where students and tutors interact via video, text chat and whiteboards. The virtual version has boomed since the federal government handed schools nearly $190 billion of pandemic recovery aid and specifically encouraged them to spend it on tutoring. Now, some new U.S. studies could offer useful guidance to educators.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Online attendance is a struggle\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the spring of 2023, almost 1,000 Northern California elementary school children in grades 1 to 4 were randomly assigned to receive online reading tutoring during the school day. Students were supposed to get 20 to 30 sessions each, but only one of five students received that much. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eighty percent didn’t\u003c/span>,\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and they didn’t do much better than the 800 students in the comparison group who didn’t get tutoring, according to a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-942\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft paper by researchers from Teachers College\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Columbia University, which was posted to the Annenberg Institute website at Brown University in April 2024. (\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report is an independent news organization based at Teachers College, Columbia University.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Researchers have previously found that it is important to schedule in-person tutoring sessions during the school day, when attendance is mandatory. The lesson here with online tutoring is that attendance can be rocky with even during the school day. Often, students end up with a low dose of tutoring instead of the high dose that schools have paid for.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">However, online tutoring can be effective when students participate regularly. In this Northern California study, reading achievement increased substantially, in line with in-person tutoring, for the roughly 200 students who got at least 20 sessions across 10 weeks.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The students who logged in regularly might have been more motivated students in the first place, the researchers warned, indicating that it could be hard to reproduce such large academic benefits for all. During the periods when children were supposed to receive tutoring, researchers observed that some children – often ones who were slightly higher achieving – regularly logged on as scheduled while others didn’t. The difference in student behavior and what the students were doing instead wasn’t explained. Students also seemed to log in more frequently when certain staff members were overseeing the tutoring and less frequently with others. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Small group tutoring doesn’t work as well online\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The large math and reading gains that researchers documented in small groups of students with in-person tutors aren’t always translating to the virtual world. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another study of more than 2,000 elementary school children in Texas tested the difference between one-to-one and two-to-one online tutoring during the 2022-23 school year. These were young, low-income children, in kindergarten through 2nd grade, who were just learning to read. Children who were randomly assigned to get \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">one-to-one tutoring four times a \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">week\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> posted small gains\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> on one test, but not on another, compared to students in a comparison group who didn’t get tutoring. First graders assigned to one-to-one tutoring gained the equivalent of 30 additional days of school. By contrast, children who had been tutored in pairs were statistically no different in reading than the comparison group of untutored children. A \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-955\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft paper about this study\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, led by researchers from Stanford University, was posted to the Annenberg website in May 2024. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another small study in Grand Forks, North Dakota confirmed the downside of larger groups with online tutoring. Researchers from Brown University directly compared the math progress of middle school students when they received one-to-one tutoring versus small groups of three students. The study was too small, only 180 students, to get statistically strong results, but the half that were randomly assigned to receive individual tutoring appeared to gain \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">eight extra percentile points\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, compared to the students who were assigned to small group tutoring. It was possible that students in the small groups learned a third as much math, the researchers estimated, but these students might have learned much less. A \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-976\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft of this paper\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was posted to the Annenberg website in June 2024. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In surveys, tutors said it was hard to keep all three kids engaged online at once. Students were more frequently distracted and off-task, they said. Shy students were less likely to speak up and participate. With one student at a time, tutors said they could move at a faster pace and students “weren’t afraid to ask questions” or “afraid of being wrong.” (On the plus side, tutors said groups of three allowed them to organize group activities or encourage a student to help a peer.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Behavior problems happen in person, too. However, when I have observed in-person small group tutoring in schools, each student is often working independently with the tutor, almost like three simultaneous sessions of one-to-one help. In-person tutors can encourage a student to keep practicing through a silent glance, a smile or hand signal even as they are explaining something to another student. Online, each child’s work and mistakes are publicly exposed on the screen to the whole group. Private asides aren’t as easy; some platforms allow the tutor to text a child privately in a chat window, but that takes time. Tutors have told me that many teens don’t like seeing their face on screen, but turning the camera off makes it harder for them to sense if a student is following along or confused.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Matt Kraft, one of the Brown researchers on the Grand Forks study, suggests that bigger changes need to be made to online tutoring lessons in order to expand from one-to-one to small group tutoring, and he notes that school staff are needed in the classroom to keep students on-task. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">School leaders have until March 2026 to spend the remainder of their $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds, but contracts with tutoring vendors must be signed by September 2024. Both options — in person and virtual — involve tradeoffs. New research evidence is showing that virtual tutoring can work well, especially when motivated students want the tutoring and log in regularly. But many of the students who are significantly behind grade level and in need of extra help may not be so motivated. Keeping the online tutoring small, ideally one-to-one, improves the chances that it will be effective. But that means serving many fewer students, leaving millions of children behind. It’s a tough choice. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-studies-online-tutoring-troubles-attendance-larger-groups/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">online tutoring\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ever since the pandemic shut down schools in the spring of 2020, education researchers have pointed to tutoring as the most promising way to help kids catch up academically. Evidence from \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27476/w27476.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">almost 100 studies\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was overwhelming for a particular kind of tutoring, called high-dosage tutoring, where students focus on either reading or math three to five times a week.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But until recently, there has been little good evidence for the effectiveness of online tutoring, where students and tutors interact via video, text chat and whiteboards. The virtual version has boomed since the federal government handed schools nearly $190 billion of pandemic recovery aid and specifically encouraged them to spend it on tutoring. Now, some new U.S. studies could offer useful guidance to educators.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Online attendance is a struggle\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the spring of 2023, almost 1,000 Northern California elementary school children in grades 1 to 4 were randomly assigned to receive online reading tutoring during the school day. Students were supposed to get 20 to 30 sessions each, but only one of five students received that much. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eighty percent didn’t\u003c/span>,\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and they didn’t do much better than the 800 students in the comparison group who didn’t get tutoring, according to a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-942\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft paper by researchers from Teachers College\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Columbia University, which was posted to the Annenberg Institute website at Brown University in April 2024. (\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report is an independent news organization based at Teachers College, Columbia University.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Researchers have previously found that it is important to schedule in-person tutoring sessions during the school day, when attendance is mandatory. The lesson here with online tutoring is that attendance can be rocky with even during the school day. Often, students end up with a low dose of tutoring instead of the high dose that schools have paid for.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">However, online tutoring can be effective when students participate regularly. In this Northern California study, reading achievement increased substantially, in line with in-person tutoring, for the roughly 200 students who got at least 20 sessions across 10 weeks.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The students who logged in regularly might have been more motivated students in the first place, the researchers warned, indicating that it could be hard to reproduce such large academic benefits for all. During the periods when children were supposed to receive tutoring, researchers observed that some children – often ones who were slightly higher achieving – regularly logged on as scheduled while others didn’t. The difference in student behavior and what the students were doing instead wasn’t explained. Students also seemed to log in more frequently when certain staff members were overseeing the tutoring and less frequently with others. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Small group tutoring doesn’t work as well online\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The large math and reading gains that researchers documented in small groups of students with in-person tutors aren’t always translating to the virtual world. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another study of more than 2,000 elementary school children in Texas tested the difference between one-to-one and two-to-one online tutoring during the 2022-23 school year. These were young, low-income children, in kindergarten through 2nd grade, who were just learning to read. Children who were randomly assigned to get \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">one-to-one tutoring four times a \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">week\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> posted small gains\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> on one test, but not on another, compared to students in a comparison group who didn’t get tutoring. First graders assigned to one-to-one tutoring gained the equivalent of 30 additional days of school. By contrast, children who had been tutored in pairs were statistically no different in reading than the comparison group of untutored children. A \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-955\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft paper about this study\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, led by researchers from Stanford University, was posted to the Annenberg website in May 2024. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another small study in Grand Forks, North Dakota confirmed the downside of larger groups with online tutoring. Researchers from Brown University directly compared the math progress of middle school students when they received one-to-one tutoring versus small groups of three students. The study was too small, only 180 students, to get statistically strong results, but the half that were randomly assigned to receive individual tutoring appeared to gain \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">eight extra percentile points\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, compared to the students who were assigned to small group tutoring. It was possible that students in the small groups learned a third as much math, the researchers estimated, but these students might have learned much less. A \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-976\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft of this paper\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was posted to the Annenberg website in June 2024. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In surveys, tutors said it was hard to keep all three kids engaged online at once. Students were more frequently distracted and off-task, they said. Shy students were less likely to speak up and participate. With one student at a time, tutors said they could move at a faster pace and students “weren’t afraid to ask questions” or “afraid of being wrong.” (On the plus side, tutors said groups of three allowed them to organize group activities or encourage a student to help a peer.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Behavior problems happen in person, too. However, when I have observed in-person small group tutoring in schools, each student is often working independently with the tutor, almost like three simultaneous sessions of one-to-one help. In-person tutors can encourage a student to keep practicing through a silent glance, a smile or hand signal even as they are explaining something to another student. Online, each child’s work and mistakes are publicly exposed on the screen to the whole group. Private asides aren’t as easy; some platforms allow the tutor to text a child privately in a chat window, but that takes time. Tutors have told me that many teens don’t like seeing their face on screen, but turning the camera off makes it harder for them to sense if a student is following along or confused.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Matt Kraft, one of the Brown researchers on the Grand Forks study, suggests that bigger changes need to be made to online tutoring lessons in order to expand from one-to-one to small group tutoring, and he notes that school staff are needed in the classroom to keep students on-task. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">School leaders have until March 2026 to spend the remainder of their $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds, but contracts with tutoring vendors must be signed by September 2024. Both options — in person and virtual — involve tradeoffs. New research evidence is showing that virtual tutoring can work well, especially when motivated students want the tutoring and log in regularly. But many of the students who are significantly behind grade level and in need of extra help may not be so motivated. Keeping the online tutoring small, ideally one-to-one, improves the chances that it will be effective. But that means serving many fewer students, leaving millions of children behind. It’s a tough choice. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-studies-online-tutoring-troubles-attendance-larger-groups/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">online tutoring\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "they-werent-yet-in-school-when-covid-hit-the-pandemic-still-set-back-the-youngest-students",
"title": "They Weren’t Yet in School When COVID Hit. The Pandemic Still Set Back the Youngest Students.",
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"headTitle": "They Weren’t Yet in School When COVID Hit. The Pandemic Still Set Back the Youngest Students. | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/07/03/pandemic-left-younger-students-struggling-to-make-academic-progress/\" rel=\"canonical\">originally published\u003c/a> by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at \u003ca href=\"https://ckbe.at/newsletters\">ckbe.at/newsletters\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While older children are showing \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64116/congress-poured-billions-of-dollars-into-schools-did-it-help-students-learn\">encouraging signs of academic recovery\u003c/a>, younger children are not making that same progress, and are sometimes falling even further behind, especially in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.bfldr.com/LS6J0F7/at/4rqc5wtpxqf85mk4pxj6rm7/ca-2024-summer-research-student-growth-technical-report.pdf\">New data released Monday\u003c/a> points to the pandemic’s profound and enduring effects on the nation’s youngest public school children, many of whom were not yet in a formal school setting when COVID hit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s showing that these students — who were either toddlers or maybe in preschool — that their learning was disrupted somehow,” said Kristen Huff, the vice president for research and assessment at Curriculum Associates, which provides math and reading tests to millions of students each year and authored the new report. “It’s striking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers and other experts have suggested several potential reasons for this trend. One is that the pandemic disrupted early childhood education and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/57373/why-we-need-to-pay-more-attention-to-the-youngest-children-right-now-and-their-parents\">made it harder for many kids to learn foundational skills\u003c/a> — gaps that can compound over time. Fewer children enrolled in \u003ca href=\"https://www.nprillinois.org/2022-04-26/the-pandemic-erased-a-decade-of-public-preschool-gains\">preschool\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/9/22/21451625/kindergarten-enrollment-decline-coronavirus-pandemic-shift/\">kindergarten\u003c/a>, and many young children struggled with remote learning. \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/01/upshot/pandemic-children-school-performance.html\">Increased parental stress and screen time\u003c/a> may also be factors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also possible that schools \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63826/these-teens-were-missing-too-much-school-heres-what-it-took-to-get-them-back\">targeted more academic support to older children and teens\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can see it as a call to action to make sure that we, as an educational community, are prioritizing those early grades,” Huff said. Those are critical years when children learn their letters and numbers and start reading and counting. “These are all the basics for being able to move along that learning trajectory for the rest of your schooling career.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64123/pandemic-aid-to-schools-paid-off-but-we-dont-know-how\">A slew of recent reports\u003c/a> have examined students’ academic progress post-pandemic. \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/02/05/learning-loss-study-finds-surprising-academic-recovery-growing-inequality/\">Some researchers found\u003c/a> that students in third to eighth grade are making larger-than-usual gains, but that most kids are still behind their pre-pandemic peers. Meanwhile, academic gaps between students from low-income backgrounds and their more affluent peers have widened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new Curriculum Associates report, which analyzed results from some 4 million students, is unique in that it includes data points for younger children who haven’t yet taken state tests. Researchers looked at how students who entered kindergarten to fourth grade during the 2021-22 school year performed in math and reading over three years, and compared that against kids who started the same grades just prior to the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Children who began kindergarten in the fall of 2021, for example, scored close to what kindergartners did prior to the pandemic in reading. But over the last few years, they’ve fallen behind their counterparts. Kids who started first grade in the fall of 2021 have been consistently behind children who started first grade prior to the pandemic in reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In math, meanwhile, students who started kindergarten, first grade, and second grade in the fall of 2021 all started off scoring lower than their counterparts did prior to the pandemic. And they’ve consistently made less progress — putting them “significantly behind” their peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Younger children made less progress than their pre-pandemic peers regardless of whether they went to schools in cities, suburbs or rural communities. And the students who started off further behind had the most difficulty catching up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schools may want to consider changing up their academic interventions to focus more on early elementary schoolers, researchers said. It will be especially important to pinpoint exactly which missing skills kids need to master so they can follow along with lessons in their current grade, Huff added. This year, many of the report’s struggling students will be entering third and fourth grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Charleston County, South Carolina, where \u003ca href=\"https://screportcards.com/overview/academics/academic-achievement/details/?q=eT0yMDIyJnQ9RCZzaWQ9MTAwMTAwMA\">younger students are outperforming\u003c/a> others \u003ca href=\"https://ed.sc.gov/data/test-scores/state-assessments/sc-ready/2023/state-scores-by-grade-level/?districtCode=9999&districtName=Statewide&schoolCode=999\">in their state\u003c/a>, especially in math, the district is using a few strategies that officials think have helped.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The district made \u003ca href=\"https://www.live5news.com/2024/04/24/charleston-co-school-district-working-improve-reading-performance-levels/\">improving reading instruction a top priority\u003c/a>. Officials purchased a new curriculum to better align with the science of reading, gave teachers \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/letrs-program-teacher-training\">extensive literacy skills training\u003c/a>, and started providing families more information about their kids’ academic performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crucially, said Buffy Roberts, who oversees assessments for Charleston County schools, the district identified groups of kids who were very behind and what it would take to catch them up over several years. Taking a longer view helped teachers break down a big job and ensured kids who needed a lot of help got more support.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We really helped people understand that if our students were already behind, making typical growth is great, but it’s not going to cut it,” Roberts said. “It was really thinking very strategically and being very targeted about what a child needs in order to get out of that, I hate to call it a hole, but it is a hole.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at \u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"mailto:kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\">\u003ci>kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/07/03/pandemic-left-younger-students-struggling-to-make-academic-progress/\" rel=\"canonical\">Chalkbeat\u003c/a> is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "A new report finds that early elementary school students are having an especially hard time catching up to their pre-pandemic peers in math and reading. Schools may need to provide them with more intensive support.",
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"title": "They Weren’t Yet in School When COVID Hit. The Pandemic Still Set Back the Youngest Students. | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/07/03/pandemic-left-younger-students-struggling-to-make-academic-progress/\" rel=\"canonical\">originally published\u003c/a> by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at \u003ca href=\"https://ckbe.at/newsletters\">ckbe.at/newsletters\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While older children are showing \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64116/congress-poured-billions-of-dollars-into-schools-did-it-help-students-learn\">encouraging signs of academic recovery\u003c/a>, younger children are not making that same progress, and are sometimes falling even further behind, especially in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.bfldr.com/LS6J0F7/at/4rqc5wtpxqf85mk4pxj6rm7/ca-2024-summer-research-student-growth-technical-report.pdf\">New data released Monday\u003c/a> points to the pandemic’s profound and enduring effects on the nation’s youngest public school children, many of whom were not yet in a formal school setting when COVID hit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s showing that these students — who were either toddlers or maybe in preschool — that their learning was disrupted somehow,” said Kristen Huff, the vice president for research and assessment at Curriculum Associates, which provides math and reading tests to millions of students each year and authored the new report. “It’s striking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers and other experts have suggested several potential reasons for this trend. One is that the pandemic disrupted early childhood education and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/57373/why-we-need-to-pay-more-attention-to-the-youngest-children-right-now-and-their-parents\">made it harder for many kids to learn foundational skills\u003c/a> — gaps that can compound over time. Fewer children enrolled in \u003ca href=\"https://www.nprillinois.org/2022-04-26/the-pandemic-erased-a-decade-of-public-preschool-gains\">preschool\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/9/22/21451625/kindergarten-enrollment-decline-coronavirus-pandemic-shift/\">kindergarten\u003c/a>, and many young children struggled with remote learning. \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/01/upshot/pandemic-children-school-performance.html\">Increased parental stress and screen time\u003c/a> may also be factors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also possible that schools \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63826/these-teens-were-missing-too-much-school-heres-what-it-took-to-get-them-back\">targeted more academic support to older children and teens\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can see it as a call to action to make sure that we, as an educational community, are prioritizing those early grades,” Huff said. Those are critical years when children learn their letters and numbers and start reading and counting. “These are all the basics for being able to move along that learning trajectory for the rest of your schooling career.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64123/pandemic-aid-to-schools-paid-off-but-we-dont-know-how\">A slew of recent reports\u003c/a> have examined students’ academic progress post-pandemic. \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/02/05/learning-loss-study-finds-surprising-academic-recovery-growing-inequality/\">Some researchers found\u003c/a> that students in third to eighth grade are making larger-than-usual gains, but that most kids are still behind their pre-pandemic peers. Meanwhile, academic gaps between students from low-income backgrounds and their more affluent peers have widened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new Curriculum Associates report, which analyzed results from some 4 million students, is unique in that it includes data points for younger children who haven’t yet taken state tests. Researchers looked at how students who entered kindergarten to fourth grade during the 2021-22 school year performed in math and reading over three years, and compared that against kids who started the same grades just prior to the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Children who began kindergarten in the fall of 2021, for example, scored close to what kindergartners did prior to the pandemic in reading. But over the last few years, they’ve fallen behind their counterparts. Kids who started first grade in the fall of 2021 have been consistently behind children who started first grade prior to the pandemic in reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In math, meanwhile, students who started kindergarten, first grade, and second grade in the fall of 2021 all started off scoring lower than their counterparts did prior to the pandemic. And they’ve consistently made less progress — putting them “significantly behind” their peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Younger children made less progress than their pre-pandemic peers regardless of whether they went to schools in cities, suburbs or rural communities. And the students who started off further behind had the most difficulty catching up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schools may want to consider changing up their academic interventions to focus more on early elementary schoolers, researchers said. It will be especially important to pinpoint exactly which missing skills kids need to master so they can follow along with lessons in their current grade, Huff added. This year, many of the report’s struggling students will be entering third and fourth grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Charleston County, South Carolina, where \u003ca href=\"https://screportcards.com/overview/academics/academic-achievement/details/?q=eT0yMDIyJnQ9RCZzaWQ9MTAwMTAwMA\">younger students are outperforming\u003c/a> others \u003ca href=\"https://ed.sc.gov/data/test-scores/state-assessments/sc-ready/2023/state-scores-by-grade-level/?districtCode=9999&districtName=Statewide&schoolCode=999\">in their state\u003c/a>, especially in math, the district is using a few strategies that officials think have helped.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The district made \u003ca href=\"https://www.live5news.com/2024/04/24/charleston-co-school-district-working-improve-reading-performance-levels/\">improving reading instruction a top priority\u003c/a>. Officials purchased a new curriculum to better align with the science of reading, gave teachers \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/letrs-program-teacher-training\">extensive literacy skills training\u003c/a>, and started providing families more information about their kids’ academic performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crucially, said Buffy Roberts, who oversees assessments for Charleston County schools, the district identified groups of kids who were very behind and what it would take to catch them up over several years. Taking a longer view helped teachers break down a big job and ensured kids who needed a lot of help got more support.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We really helped people understand that if our students were already behind, making typical growth is great, but it’s not going to cut it,” Roberts said. “It was really thinking very strategically and being very targeted about what a child needs in order to get out of that, I hate to call it a hole, but it is a hole.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at \u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"mailto:kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\">\u003ci>kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/07/03/pandemic-left-younger-students-struggling-to-make-academic-progress/\" rel=\"canonical\">Chalkbeat\u003c/a> is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "pandemic-aid-to-schools-paid-off-but-we-dont-know-how",
"title": "Pandemic Aid to Schools Paid Off, But We Don't Know How",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Reports about schools squandering their $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery money have been troubling. Many districts spent that money on things that had nothing to do with academics, particularly building renovations. Less common, but more \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://defendinged.org/investigations/wasteful-esser-expenditures/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">eye-popping were stories\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> about new football fields, swimming pool passes, hotel rooms at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and even the purchase of an ice cream truck.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I was surprised that two independent academic analyses released in June 2024 found that some of the money actually trickled down to students and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64116/congress-poured-billions-of-dollars-into-schools-did-it-help-students-learn\">helped them catch up academically\u003c/a>. Though the two studies used different methods, they arrived at strikingly similar numbers for the average growth in math and reading scores during the 2022-23 school year that could be attributed to each dollar of federal aid.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the research teams, which includes Harvard University economist Tom Kane and Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon, likened the gains to \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">six days of learning in math and three days of learning in reading \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">for every $1,000 in federal pandemic aid per student. Though that gain might seem small, high-poverty districts received an average of $7,700 per student, and those extra “days” of learning for low-income students added up. Still, these neediest children were projected to be one third of a grade level behind low-income students in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted education.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Federal funding helped and it helped kids most in need,” \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/RbnLake/status/1805957194942398492\">wrote Robin Lake\u003c/a>, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, on X in response to the two studies. Lake was not involved in either report, but has been closely tracking pandemic recovery. “And the spending was worth the gains,” Lake added. “But it will not be enough to do all that is needed.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The academic gains per aid dollar were close to what \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20220279\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">previous researchers had found for increases in school spending\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. In other words, federal pandemic aid for schools has been just as effective (or ineffective) as other infusions of money for schools. The Harvard-Stanford analysis calculated that the seemingly small academic gains per $1,000 could boost a student’s lifetime earnings by $1,238 – not a dramatic payoff, but not a public policy bust either. And that payoff doesn’t include other societal benefits from higher academic achievement, such as lower rates of arrests and teen motherhood.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The most interesting nuggets from the two reports, however, were how the academic gains varied wildly across the nation. That’s not only because some schools used the money more effectively than others but also because some schools got much more aid per student.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The poorest districts in the nation, where 80% or more of the students live in families whose income is low enough to qualify for the federally funded school lunch program, demonstrated meaningful recovery because they received the most aid. About 6% of the 26 million public schoolchildren that the researchers studied are educated in districts this poor. These children had recovered almost half of their pandemic learning losses by the spring of 2023. The very poorest districts, representing 1% of the children, were potentially on track for an almost complete recovery in 2024 because they tended to receive the most aid per student. However, these students were far below grade level before the pandemic, so their recovery brings them back to a very low rung.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some high-poverty school districts received much more aid per student than others. At the top end of the range, students in Detroit received about $26,000 each – $1.3 billion spread among fewer than 49,000 students. One in 10 high-poverty districts received more than $10,700 for each student. An equal number of high-poverty districts received less than $3,700 per student. These surprising differences for places with similar poverty levels occurred because pandemic aid was allocated according to the same byzantine rules that govern federal Title I funding to low-income schools. Those formulas give large minimum grants to small states, and more money to states that spend more per student.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">On the other end of the income spectrum are wealthier districts, where 30% or fewer students qualify for the lunch program, representing about a quarter of U.S. children. The Harvard-Stanford researchers expect these students to make an almost complete recovery. That’s not because of federal recovery funds; these districts received less than $1,000 per student, on average. Researchers explained that these students are on track to approach 2019 achievement levels because they didn’t suffer as much learning loss. Wealthier families also had the means to hire tutors or time to help their children at home.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Middle-income districts, where between 30% and 80% of students are eligible for the lunch program, were caught in between. Roughly seven out of 10 children in this study fall into this category. Their learning losses were sometimes large, but their pandemic aid wasn’t. They tended to receive between $1,000 and $5,000 per student. Many of these students are still struggling to catch up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the second study, researchers Dan Goldhaber of the American Institutes for Research and Grace Falken of the University of Washington estimated that schools around the country, on average, would need an additional \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/CALDER%20WP%20301-0624.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">$13,000 per student\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> for full recovery in reading and math. That’s more than Congress appropriated.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There were signs that schools targeted interventions to their neediest students. In school districts that separately reported performance for low-income students, these students tended to post greater recovery per dollar of aid than wealthier students, the Goldhaber-Falken analysis shows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Impact differed more by race, location and school spending. Districts with larger shares of white students tended to make greater achievement gains per dollar of federal aid than districts with larger shares of Black or Hispanic students. Small towns tended to produce more academic gains per dollar of aid than large cities. And school districts that spend less on education per pupil tended to see more academic gains per dollar of aid than high spenders. The latter makes sense: an extra dollar to a small budget makes a bigger difference than an extra dollar to a large budget.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The most frustrating part of both reports is that we have no idea what schools did to help students catch up. Researchers weren’t able to connect the academic gains to tutoring, summer school or any of the other interventions that schools have been trying. Schools still have until September to decide how to spend their remaining pandemic recovery funds, and, unfortunately, these analyses provide zero guidance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And maybe some of the non-academic things that schools spent money on weren’t so frivolous after all. A draft paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2024 calculated that school spending on \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.barbarabiasi.com/uploads/1/0/1/2/101280322/bls_whatworks.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">basic infrastructure\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, such as air conditioning and heating systems, raised test scores. Spending on athletic facilities did not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meanwhile, the final score on pandemic recovery for students is still to come. I’ll be looking out for it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-190-billion-question-partially-answered/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">federal funding for education\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Reports about schools squandering their $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery money have been troubling. Many districts spent that money on things that had nothing to do with academics, particularly building renovations. Less common, but more \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://defendinged.org/investigations/wasteful-esser-expenditures/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">eye-popping were stories\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> about new football fields, swimming pool passes, hotel rooms at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and even the purchase of an ice cream truck.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I was surprised that two independent academic analyses released in June 2024 found that some of the money actually trickled down to students and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64116/congress-poured-billions-of-dollars-into-schools-did-it-help-students-learn\">helped them catch up academically\u003c/a>. Though the two studies used different methods, they arrived at strikingly similar numbers for the average growth in math and reading scores during the 2022-23 school year that could be attributed to each dollar of federal aid.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the research teams, which includes Harvard University economist Tom Kane and Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon, likened the gains to \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">six days of learning in math and three days of learning in reading \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">for every $1,000 in federal pandemic aid per student. Though that gain might seem small, high-poverty districts received an average of $7,700 per student, and those extra “days” of learning for low-income students added up. Still, these neediest children were projected to be one third of a grade level behind low-income students in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted education.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Federal funding helped and it helped kids most in need,” \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/RbnLake/status/1805957194942398492\">wrote Robin Lake\u003c/a>, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, on X in response to the two studies. Lake was not involved in either report, but has been closely tracking pandemic recovery. “And the spending was worth the gains,” Lake added. “But it will not be enough to do all that is needed.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The academic gains per aid dollar were close to what \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20220279\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">previous researchers had found for increases in school spending\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. In other words, federal pandemic aid for schools has been just as effective (or ineffective) as other infusions of money for schools. The Harvard-Stanford analysis calculated that the seemingly small academic gains per $1,000 could boost a student’s lifetime earnings by $1,238 – not a dramatic payoff, but not a public policy bust either. And that payoff doesn’t include other societal benefits from higher academic achievement, such as lower rates of arrests and teen motherhood.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The most interesting nuggets from the two reports, however, were how the academic gains varied wildly across the nation. That’s not only because some schools used the money more effectively than others but also because some schools got much more aid per student.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The poorest districts in the nation, where 80% or more of the students live in families whose income is low enough to qualify for the federally funded school lunch program, demonstrated meaningful recovery because they received the most aid. About 6% of the 26 million public schoolchildren that the researchers studied are educated in districts this poor. These children had recovered almost half of their pandemic learning losses by the spring of 2023. The very poorest districts, representing 1% of the children, were potentially on track for an almost complete recovery in 2024 because they tended to receive the most aid per student. However, these students were far below grade level before the pandemic, so their recovery brings them back to a very low rung.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some high-poverty school districts received much more aid per student than others. At the top end of the range, students in Detroit received about $26,000 each – $1.3 billion spread among fewer than 49,000 students. One in 10 high-poverty districts received more than $10,700 for each student. An equal number of high-poverty districts received less than $3,700 per student. These surprising differences for places with similar poverty levels occurred because pandemic aid was allocated according to the same byzantine rules that govern federal Title I funding to low-income schools. Those formulas give large minimum grants to small states, and more money to states that spend more per student.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">On the other end of the income spectrum are wealthier districts, where 30% or fewer students qualify for the lunch program, representing about a quarter of U.S. children. The Harvard-Stanford researchers expect these students to make an almost complete recovery. That’s not because of federal recovery funds; these districts received less than $1,000 per student, on average. Researchers explained that these students are on track to approach 2019 achievement levels because they didn’t suffer as much learning loss. Wealthier families also had the means to hire tutors or time to help their children at home.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Middle-income districts, where between 30% and 80% of students are eligible for the lunch program, were caught in between. Roughly seven out of 10 children in this study fall into this category. Their learning losses were sometimes large, but their pandemic aid wasn’t. They tended to receive between $1,000 and $5,000 per student. Many of these students are still struggling to catch up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the second study, researchers Dan Goldhaber of the American Institutes for Research and Grace Falken of the University of Washington estimated that schools around the country, on average, would need an additional \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/CALDER%20WP%20301-0624.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">$13,000 per student\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> for full recovery in reading and math. That’s more than Congress appropriated.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There were signs that schools targeted interventions to their neediest students. In school districts that separately reported performance for low-income students, these students tended to post greater recovery per dollar of aid than wealthier students, the Goldhaber-Falken analysis shows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Impact differed more by race, location and school spending. Districts with larger shares of white students tended to make greater achievement gains per dollar of federal aid than districts with larger shares of Black or Hispanic students. Small towns tended to produce more academic gains per dollar of aid than large cities. And school districts that spend less on education per pupil tended to see more academic gains per dollar of aid than high spenders. The latter makes sense: an extra dollar to a small budget makes a bigger difference than an extra dollar to a large budget.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The most frustrating part of both reports is that we have no idea what schools did to help students catch up. Researchers weren’t able to connect the academic gains to tutoring, summer school or any of the other interventions that schools have been trying. Schools still have until September to decide how to spend their remaining pandemic recovery funds, and, unfortunately, these analyses provide zero guidance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And maybe some of the non-academic things that schools spent money on weren’t so frivolous after all. A draft paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2024 calculated that school spending on \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.barbarabiasi.com/uploads/1/0/1/2/101280322/bls_whatworks.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">basic infrastructure\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, such as air conditioning and heating systems, raised test scores. Spending on athletic facilities did not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meanwhile, the final score on pandemic recovery for students is still to come. I’ll be looking out for it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-190-billion-question-partially-answered/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">federal funding for education\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>America’s schools received an unprecedented $190 billion in federal emergency funding during the pandemic. Since then, one big question has loomed over them: Did that historic infusion of federal relief help students make up for the learning they missed?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two new research studies, conducted separately but both released on Wednesday, offer the first answer to that question: Yes, the money made a meaningful difference. But both studies come with context and caveats that, along with that headline finding, require some unpacking.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>How much of a difference did the money make?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>$190 billion is an enormous amount of money by any measure. But districts were only required to spend a fraction of the relief on academic recovery, by paying for proven interventions like summer learning and high-quality tutoring. So how much additional student learning did the federal aid actually buy?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/\">Study #1\u003c/a>, a collaboration including Tom Kane at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and Sean Reardon at Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, estimates that every $1,000 in federal relief spent per student bought the kind of math test score gains that come with 3% of a school year, or about six school days of learning. That’s during the 2022-23 academic year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Improvements in reading scores were smaller: roughly three school days of progress per $1,000 in federal relief spending per student.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal relief “was worth the investment,” Reardon tells NPR. “It led to significant improvements in children’s academic performance… It wasn’t enough money, or enough recovery, to get students all the way back to where they were in 2019, but it did make a significant difference.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://caldercenter.org/publications/esser-and-student-achievement-assessing-impacts-largest-one-time-federal-investment-k12\">Study #2\u003c/a>, co-authored by researcher Dan Goldhaber at the University of Washington and American Institutes for Research, offers a similar estimate of math gains. The increase in reading scores, according to Goldhaber, appeared comparable to those math gains, though he says they’re less precise and a little less certain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It did have an impact,” Goldhaber tells NPR, an impact that’s “in line with estimates from prior research about how much money moves the needle of student achievement.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Who benefited the most?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The federal recovery dollars came in three waves, known as ESSER (\u003ca href=\"https://oese.ed.gov/offices/education-stabilization-fund/elementary-secondary-school-emergency-relief-fund/\">Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund\u003c/a>) I, II and III. The first two waves were relatively small, roughly $68 billion, compared to the $122 billion of ESSER III.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The windfall was distributed to schools based largely on need – specifically, based on the proportion of students living in or near poverty. The assumption being: Districts with higher rates of student poverty would need more help recovering. COVID hit high-poverty communities harder, with higher rates of infection, death, unemployment and remote schooling than in many affluent communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These and other factors likely caused greater learning loss during the pandemic and dampened academic recovery,” Goldhaber writes in Study #2, pointing out that, “the Detroit, MI public school district received about $25,800 per pupil across all waves of ESSER… [while] Grosse Pointe, MI (a nearby suburb) only received about $860 per pupil.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s where the story of these federal dollars gets complicated, because the learning they appear to have bought wasn’t experienced evenly, according to Goldhaber.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Study #2, he and co-author Grace Falken, found larger academic benefits from federal spending in districts serving low shares of Black and Hispanic students. Though he tells NPR, these patterns “do not necessarily imply that ESSER’s impacts vary \u003cem>because\u003c/em> of student demographics. Rather, the results could reflect other district characteristics that happen to correlate with the student populations the districts serve.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reardon and Kane did not find statistically significant evidence of this kind of variation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Goldhaber and Falken also found that towns saw more math gains than cities, while rural areas led the way in reading growth. Interestingly, suburban districts generally experienced “smaller, insignificant impacts” from the federal spending in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>But did the money help enough?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>If your standard for “enough” is a full recovery for all students from the learning they missed during the pandemic, then no, the money did not remedy the full problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the researchers behind both studies say that’s an unrealistic and unreasonable yardstick. After all, Congress only required that districts spend at least 20% of ESSER III funds on learning recovery. The rest of the relief came with relatively few strings attached.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, the researchers say, the money’s effectiveness should be judged by a more realistic standard, based on what previous research has shown money can and cannot buy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard’s Tom Kane, of Study #1, points out that their results do line up with pre-pandemic research on the impact of school spending, and suggest a clear, long-term return on investment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These academic gains will translate into improvements in earnings and other outcomes that will last a lifetime,” Kane tells NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, the academic gains associated with every $1,000 in per student spending would be worth $1,238 in future earnings, Kane estimates. Increased academic achievement also comes with valuable social returns, he says, including lower rates of arrest and teen motherhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s more, Reardon tells NPR, because these federal dollars disproportionately went to lower-income districts, “not only do we find that the federal investment raised test scores, but we also find that it reduced educational inequality.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the work’s not over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Study #2, Goldhaber and Falken write, “to recover from these remaining losses, our estimates suggest schools would need between $9,000 and $13,000 in additional funds per pupil, assuming the return on those funds is similar to what we estimated for ESSER III.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They also warn that middle-income districts could continue to struggle – because they experienced academic losses but got less federal aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a presidential election year, it’s unlikely Congress will agree to send schools more money. And Goldhaber worries, as ESSER funds begin to expire this year, districts will have to cut staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Some districts, particularly high poverty, high minority districts, are going to lose so much money that I think teacher layoffs are inevitable,” Goldhaber tells NPR. “So I’m worried that the funding cliff – there’s a downside that we’re not thinking hard enough about.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The good news, says Kane, is that ESSER was a massive, “brute force” effort, and a far smaller, state-driven effort could still make a big difference, so long as it’s hyper-focused on academic interventions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kane says, “It falls to states to complete the recovery.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>America’s schools received an unprecedented $190 billion in federal emergency funding during the pandemic. Since then, one big question has loomed over them: Did that historic infusion of federal relief help students make up for the learning they missed?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two new research studies, conducted separately but both released on Wednesday, offer the first answer to that question: Yes, the money made a meaningful difference. But both studies come with context and caveats that, along with that headline finding, require some unpacking.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>How much of a difference did the money make?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>$190 billion is an enormous amount of money by any measure. But districts were only required to spend a fraction of the relief on academic recovery, by paying for proven interventions like summer learning and high-quality tutoring. So how much additional student learning did the federal aid actually buy?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/\">Study #1\u003c/a>, a collaboration including Tom Kane at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and Sean Reardon at Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, estimates that every $1,000 in federal relief spent per student bought the kind of math test score gains that come with 3% of a school year, or about six school days of learning. That’s during the 2022-23 academic year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Improvements in reading scores were smaller: roughly three school days of progress per $1,000 in federal relief spending per student.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal relief “was worth the investment,” Reardon tells NPR. “It led to significant improvements in children’s academic performance… It wasn’t enough money, or enough recovery, to get students all the way back to where they were in 2019, but it did make a significant difference.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://caldercenter.org/publications/esser-and-student-achievement-assessing-impacts-largest-one-time-federal-investment-k12\">Study #2\u003c/a>, co-authored by researcher Dan Goldhaber at the University of Washington and American Institutes for Research, offers a similar estimate of math gains. The increase in reading scores, according to Goldhaber, appeared comparable to those math gains, though he says they’re less precise and a little less certain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It did have an impact,” Goldhaber tells NPR, an impact that’s “in line with estimates from prior research about how much money moves the needle of student achievement.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Who benefited the most?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The federal recovery dollars came in three waves, known as ESSER (\u003ca href=\"https://oese.ed.gov/offices/education-stabilization-fund/elementary-secondary-school-emergency-relief-fund/\">Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund\u003c/a>) I, II and III. The first two waves were relatively small, roughly $68 billion, compared to the $122 billion of ESSER III.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The windfall was distributed to schools based largely on need – specifically, based on the proportion of students living in or near poverty. The assumption being: Districts with higher rates of student poverty would need more help recovering. COVID hit high-poverty communities harder, with higher rates of infection, death, unemployment and remote schooling than in many affluent communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These and other factors likely caused greater learning loss during the pandemic and dampened academic recovery,” Goldhaber writes in Study #2, pointing out that, “the Detroit, MI public school district received about $25,800 per pupil across all waves of ESSER… [while] Grosse Pointe, MI (a nearby suburb) only received about $860 per pupil.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s where the story of these federal dollars gets complicated, because the learning they appear to have bought wasn’t experienced evenly, according to Goldhaber.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Study #2, he and co-author Grace Falken, found larger academic benefits from federal spending in districts serving low shares of Black and Hispanic students. Though he tells NPR, these patterns “do not necessarily imply that ESSER’s impacts vary \u003cem>because\u003c/em> of student demographics. Rather, the results could reflect other district characteristics that happen to correlate with the student populations the districts serve.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reardon and Kane did not find statistically significant evidence of this kind of variation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Goldhaber and Falken also found that towns saw more math gains than cities, while rural areas led the way in reading growth. Interestingly, suburban districts generally experienced “smaller, insignificant impacts” from the federal spending in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>But did the money help enough?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>If your standard for “enough” is a full recovery for all students from the learning they missed during the pandemic, then no, the money did not remedy the full problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the researchers behind both studies say that’s an unrealistic and unreasonable yardstick. After all, Congress only required that districts spend at least 20% of ESSER III funds on learning recovery. The rest of the relief came with relatively few strings attached.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, the researchers say, the money’s effectiveness should be judged by a more realistic standard, based on what previous research has shown money can and cannot buy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard’s Tom Kane, of Study #1, points out that their results do line up with pre-pandemic research on the impact of school spending, and suggest a clear, long-term return on investment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These academic gains will translate into improvements in earnings and other outcomes that will last a lifetime,” Kane tells NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, the academic gains associated with every $1,000 in per student spending would be worth $1,238 in future earnings, Kane estimates. Increased academic achievement also comes with valuable social returns, he says, including lower rates of arrest and teen motherhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s more, Reardon tells NPR, because these federal dollars disproportionately went to lower-income districts, “not only do we find that the federal investment raised test scores, but we also find that it reduced educational inequality.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the work’s not over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Study #2, Goldhaber and Falken write, “to recover from these remaining losses, our estimates suggest schools would need between $9,000 and $13,000 in additional funds per pupil, assuming the return on those funds is similar to what we estimated for ESSER III.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They also warn that middle-income districts could continue to struggle – because they experienced academic losses but got less federal aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a presidential election year, it’s unlikely Congress will agree to send schools more money. And Goldhaber worries, as ESSER funds begin to expire this year, districts will have to cut staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Some districts, particularly high poverty, high minority districts, are going to lose so much money that I think teacher layoffs are inevitable,” Goldhaber tells NPR. “So I’m worried that the funding cliff – there’s a downside that we’re not thinking hard enough about.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The good news, says Kane, is that ESSER was a massive, “brute force” effort, and a far smaller, state-driven effort could still make a big difference, so long as it’s hyper-focused on academic interventions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kane says, “It falls to states to complete the recovery.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>In rural Livingston, Calif., where people are vastly outnumbered by sweet potatoes, something remarkable is happening in the public schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When kindergarten teacher Lupe Fuentes tells her class they have perfect attendance for the day, the roomful of children cheer, “Hip, hip hooray, everybody’s here today!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nearby, gathered on the learning rug in teacher Diana Dickey’s classroom, the kindergartners aren’t cheering: They’ve just been told one of their classmates is absent. Sick, perhaps – though Dickey isn’t sure yet. A few children seem concerned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dickey reminds them to keep the absent boy in their hearts. On the whiteboard, she has drawn a large, dry-erase heart. Above it is a gallery of small, magnetized photos – one for every child in the class. Dickey and the class then move the absent boy’s photo \u003cem>inside\u003c/em> the heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Boom, boom, pow,” they sing together, to the absent boy. “We miss you, and we wish you well.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64002\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 700px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-64002\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder2.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"700\" height=\"467\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder2.jpeg 700w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder2-160x107.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">On the whiteboard, kindergarten teacher Diana Dickey has drawn a large, dry-erase heart. Above it is a gallery of small, magnetized photos – one for every child in the class. When a student is absent, their photo is moved into the heart. \u003ccite>(Preston Gannaway for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>These attendance ceremonies may seem small, but they send a powerful message to every child in class: In Livingston, when you miss school, you’re not just absent – you’re \u003cem>missed\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In many K-12 schools across the country, an alarming number of children have been chronically absent – an old problem that COVID-19 made much, much worse. To be considered chronically absent, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63984/as-chronic-absenteeism-soars-in-schools-most-parents-arent-sure-what-it-is\">student must miss at least 10% of the school year\u003c/a>, usually around 18 school days. According to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/02/09/1228441120/covid-schools-students-learning\">an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute\u003c/a>, more than 1 in 4 students across the U.S. was chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the hardest-hit grades might surprise you: kindergarten.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64001\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 700px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-64001\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder3.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"700\" height=\"467\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder3.jpeg 700w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder3-160x107.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kindergarten teacher Lupe Fuentes waits with students for class to start at Selma Herndon Elementary. \u003ccite>(Preston Gannaway for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In California, for example, more than 1 in 3 kindergartners was chronically absent. But the tiny town of Livingston, in California’s sprawling Central Valley, is an outlier – and a powerful lesson in the ways a district can proactively \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63142/early-warning-systems-fall-short-in-combating-absenteeism-at-school\">prevent wide-scale absenteeism.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were just wowed by what we saw the moment we set foot on Livingston’s campuses,” says Sujie Shin with the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shin reviewed attendance data for all of California’s roughly 1,000 school districts, searching for solutions to the absenteeism crisis. She noticed Livingston’s kindergarten absenteeism rate was much lower – nearly 10 percentage points lower – than the state average. She wondered what they were doing that was so \u003cem>right\u003c/em>?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The short answer is: a lot. Here are three things.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>1. Teaching young parents that kindergarten attendance matters\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>During the pandemic, many parents didn’t send their children to preschool or day care, which means they weren’t forming consistent attendance habits until kindergarten.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-64000\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1300\" height=\"867\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4.jpeg 1300w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4-800x534.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4-1020x680.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4-160x107.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4-768x512.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1300px) 100vw, 1300px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For many families, especially post-pandemic, this is the first time you’re actually sharing the responsibility of nurturing and raising your child with another human being,” says Hedy Chang, who founded the nonprofit initiative Attendance Works. She’s considered one of the smartest people in the country when it comes to understanding chronic absenteeism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chang says some kindergarten families simply don’t understand how important it is to be consistent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Attendance is a lot about laying down the line and saying, ‘Hey, we’re gonna get my kid to school every day. And I’m gonna partner with my teacher so this is both engaging and we have the supports we need,’” Chang says. “When we have that experience in kindergarten, we lay the foundation for our future.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The opposite is also true. Chang warns that poor attendance can have a long-term impact. “Chronic absence in kindergarten is associated with not being as likely to read or count proficiently in third grade.\u003cstrong>”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mayte Ramírez, a principal at one of Livingston’s elementary schools, will often \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63920/building-parent-teacher-relationships-can-be-hard-positive-phone-calls-home-can-help\">pick up the phone and call the families\u003c/a> of absent kindergartners with a warning: Missing one day of kindergarten is like missing three.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The day that they were absent,” Ramírez says, “that’s a whole day.” The second day, they may come back, but they’re so busy catching up, they miss new material. “On the third day, they’re still trying to catch up! So they’re missing three days of instruction. And for littles, that’s huge.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63999\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 700px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-63999\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder5.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"700\" height=\"467\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder5.jpeg 700w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder5-160x107.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Students head to class at Selma Herndon Elementary in Livingston, Calif. \u003ccite>( Preston Gannaway for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>One Livingston mom, Yolanda, says she learned this lesson the hard way. We agreed to only use Yolanda’s first name because it can be hard to talk about absenteeism. She says that two years ago, when her daughter was in kindergarten, Yolanda let her miss a lot of school. Her daughter wasn’t necessarily sick; there were times she simply didn’t want to go. By the time her daughter got to first grade, she struggled with reading and writing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I realized I shouldn’t have [let her miss class],” Yolanda says. “Now that I have my 5-year-old [son] in kindergarten, I do not let him miss school. He’s only missed one day. So that he doesn’t struggle like his sister.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>2. Helping parents make sense of pandemic health rules\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>During COVID, families were often told: If your child seems sick, keep them home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now though, \u003cem>absenteeism \u003c/em>has become an epidemic, and schools are telling families: Unless your child is really sick (fever, vomiting or diarrhea), they should be in class. It’s a big change, says Rafael Bautista, the father of another Livingston kindergartner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64003\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1300px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-64003\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1300\" height=\"867\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra.jpeg 1300w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra-800x534.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra-1020x680.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra-160x107.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra-768x512.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1300px) 100vw, 1300px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Diana Dickey greets students on their way into class. \u003ccite>(Preston Gannaway for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When one of his kids gets the sniffles, he wonders, “Should I send them to school like that? Or should I just make sure he is fine? You know? And also, I mean, allergies … you don’t know! Our kids get sick very often.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Livingston has a fix for all this confusion. Her name is Lori Morgan, and she’s the district’s top nurse. She gives families her personal cell number and tells them, if in doubt, call her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I was on vacation [recently],” Morgan says with a smile. “I was on the phone and on email with a dozen parents. Yeah, I’m never really \u003cem>off\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Livingston, Nurse Lori, as she’s known, tells families they don’t have to decide if their child is too sick for school. Just meet her or a member of her health staff in the school parking lot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You don’t even have to get out of the car. Just stay in the car,” Morgan tells families. “We’ll come out and check your child out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She may take their temperature, ask a few questions. If a child is truly sick, Morgan says, she helps families get a quick doctor’s appointment at the local health clinic. But, she laughs, “99% of the time they’re well enough to stay.” And so she walks them to class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Livingston schools, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63951/3-strategies-for-encouraging-dads-involvement-in-schools\">building relationships with families\u003c/a> isn’t a side project. It’s fundamental. And it isn’t just Morgan. Each school site employs a dedicated parent liaison. And at morning drop-off, kindergarten parents are allowed to enter the closed campus and walk their children to a waiting teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our families have a close connection to our schools\u003cem>,\u003c/em>” says Superintendent Andres Zamora, who is wrapping up his 15th year in Livingston.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>3. Making school a place children want to be\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Helping parents see the value of kindergarten and understand post-pandemic health rules can boost attendance, sure. But the most important thing schools can do is make sure kids \u003cem>want\u003c/em> to be there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>“\u003c/em>She is excited for school every morning,” says Erika Zurita, whose daughter is in kindergarten in Livingston. “This spring break, she kept asking me, ‘Are we going to school tomorrow? I miss my teacher, my school, my classmates.’ She loves it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63998\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1300px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-63998\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1300\" height=\"867\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6.jpeg 1300w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6-800x534.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6-1020x680.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6-160x107.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6-768x512.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1300px) 100vw, 1300px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lupe Fuentes (left) and Yesenia Covarrubias teach a lesson on courage. \u003ccite>(Preston Gannaway for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>How in the world do you do that? Sujie Shin, with the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, says the research is clear: One of the best predictors of a child’s success in school is how they answer one, simple question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Is there an adult at school that cares about you? Yes or no? That’s it,” Shin says. “That’s the question that can tell you everything.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in Livingston, Shin says, it’s clear that teachers and school leaders share “this real intense focus on \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63861/how-to-build-mutually-respectful-relationships-with-students-from-day-1\">creating and maintaining relationships\u003c/a> every single moment possible.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At her school, Principal Mayte Ramírez waits outside during morning drop-off, the first face many kids see as they emerge from the bus or idling cars. She flits easily between English and Spanish, which puts many families at ease as more than 80% of the district’s children are Hispanic. It’s not uncommon to hear Ramírez call a child “my heart” or “mi corazón.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When an SUV pulls up a few minutes late, Ramírez finds a little boy in the back seat, folded into a ball of anxiety. He does not want to go to school, and his mother isn’t sure what to do. But Principal Ramírez knows him – and the boy knows her. She opens the rear door, leans all the way in and gently extends her hand to the little boy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Come and help me, my love,” Ramírez says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The little boy unfolds himself, takes his principal’s hand and steps out of the car. Ramírez repays his trust by walking him through the front gates and all the way to his classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the way, she assures him, “You’re gonna have a great day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Audio stories produced by Lauren Migaki\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In rural Livingston, Calif., where people are vastly outnumbered by sweet potatoes, something remarkable is happening in the public schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When kindergarten teacher Lupe Fuentes tells her class they have perfect attendance for the day, the roomful of children cheer, “Hip, hip hooray, everybody’s here today!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nearby, gathered on the learning rug in teacher Diana Dickey’s classroom, the kindergartners aren’t cheering: They’ve just been told one of their classmates is absent. Sick, perhaps – though Dickey isn’t sure yet. A few children seem concerned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dickey reminds them to keep the absent boy in their hearts. On the whiteboard, she has drawn a large, dry-erase heart. Above it is a gallery of small, magnetized photos – one for every child in the class. Dickey and the class then move the absent boy’s photo \u003cem>inside\u003c/em> the heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Boom, boom, pow,” they sing together, to the absent boy. “We miss you, and we wish you well.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64002\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 700px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-64002\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder2.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"700\" height=\"467\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder2.jpeg 700w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder2-160x107.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">On the whiteboard, kindergarten teacher Diana Dickey has drawn a large, dry-erase heart. Above it is a gallery of small, magnetized photos – one for every child in the class. When a student is absent, their photo is moved into the heart. \u003ccite>(Preston Gannaway for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>These attendance ceremonies may seem small, but they send a powerful message to every child in class: In Livingston, when you miss school, you’re not just absent – you’re \u003cem>missed\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In many K-12 schools across the country, an alarming number of children have been chronically absent – an old problem that COVID-19 made much, much worse. To be considered chronically absent, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63984/as-chronic-absenteeism-soars-in-schools-most-parents-arent-sure-what-it-is\">student must miss at least 10% of the school year\u003c/a>, usually around 18 school days. According to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/02/09/1228441120/covid-schools-students-learning\">an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute\u003c/a>, more than 1 in 4 students across the U.S. was chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the hardest-hit grades might surprise you: kindergarten.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64001\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 700px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-64001\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder3.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"700\" height=\"467\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder3.jpeg 700w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder3-160x107.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kindergarten teacher Lupe Fuentes waits with students for class to start at Selma Herndon Elementary. \u003ccite>(Preston Gannaway for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In California, for example, more than 1 in 3 kindergartners was chronically absent. But the tiny town of Livingston, in California’s sprawling Central Valley, is an outlier – and a powerful lesson in the ways a district can proactively \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63142/early-warning-systems-fall-short-in-combating-absenteeism-at-school\">prevent wide-scale absenteeism.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were just wowed by what we saw the moment we set foot on Livingston’s campuses,” says Sujie Shin with the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shin reviewed attendance data for all of California’s roughly 1,000 school districts, searching for solutions to the absenteeism crisis. She noticed Livingston’s kindergarten absenteeism rate was much lower – nearly 10 percentage points lower – than the state average. She wondered what they were doing that was so \u003cem>right\u003c/em>?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The short answer is: a lot. Here are three things.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>1. Teaching young parents that kindergarten attendance matters\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>During the pandemic, many parents didn’t send their children to preschool or day care, which means they weren’t forming consistent attendance habits until kindergarten.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-64000\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1300\" height=\"867\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4.jpeg 1300w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4-800x534.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4-1020x680.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4-160x107.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder4-768x512.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1300px) 100vw, 1300px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For many families, especially post-pandemic, this is the first time you’re actually sharing the responsibility of nurturing and raising your child with another human being,” says Hedy Chang, who founded the nonprofit initiative Attendance Works. She’s considered one of the smartest people in the country when it comes to understanding chronic absenteeism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chang says some kindergarten families simply don’t understand how important it is to be consistent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Attendance is a lot about laying down the line and saying, ‘Hey, we’re gonna get my kid to school every day. And I’m gonna partner with my teacher so this is both engaging and we have the supports we need,’” Chang says. “When we have that experience in kindergarten, we lay the foundation for our future.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The opposite is also true. Chang warns that poor attendance can have a long-term impact. “Chronic absence in kindergarten is associated with not being as likely to read or count proficiently in third grade.\u003cstrong>”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mayte Ramírez, a principal at one of Livingston’s elementary schools, will often \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63920/building-parent-teacher-relationships-can-be-hard-positive-phone-calls-home-can-help\">pick up the phone and call the families\u003c/a> of absent kindergartners with a warning: Missing one day of kindergarten is like missing three.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The day that they were absent,” Ramírez says, “that’s a whole day.” The second day, they may come back, but they’re so busy catching up, they miss new material. “On the third day, they’re still trying to catch up! So they’re missing three days of instruction. And for littles, that’s huge.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63999\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 700px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-63999\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder5.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"700\" height=\"467\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder5.jpeg 700w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder5-160x107.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Students head to class at Selma Herndon Elementary in Livingston, Calif. \u003ccite>( Preston Gannaway for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>One Livingston mom, Yolanda, says she learned this lesson the hard way. We agreed to only use Yolanda’s first name because it can be hard to talk about absenteeism. She says that two years ago, when her daughter was in kindergarten, Yolanda let her miss a lot of school. Her daughter wasn’t necessarily sick; there were times she simply didn’t want to go. By the time her daughter got to first grade, she struggled with reading and writing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I realized I shouldn’t have [let her miss class],” Yolanda says. “Now that I have my 5-year-old [son] in kindergarten, I do not let him miss school. He’s only missed one day. So that he doesn’t struggle like his sister.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>2. Helping parents make sense of pandemic health rules\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>During COVID, families were often told: If your child seems sick, keep them home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now though, \u003cem>absenteeism \u003c/em>has become an epidemic, and schools are telling families: Unless your child is really sick (fever, vomiting or diarrhea), they should be in class. It’s a big change, says Rafael Bautista, the father of another Livingston kindergartner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64003\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1300px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-64003\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1300\" height=\"867\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra.jpeg 1300w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra-800x534.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra-1020x680.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra-160x107.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder-extra-768x512.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1300px) 100vw, 1300px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Diana Dickey greets students on their way into class. \u003ccite>(Preston Gannaway for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When one of his kids gets the sniffles, he wonders, “Should I send them to school like that? Or should I just make sure he is fine? You know? And also, I mean, allergies … you don’t know! Our kids get sick very often.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Livingston has a fix for all this confusion. Her name is Lori Morgan, and she’s the district’s top nurse. She gives families her personal cell number and tells them, if in doubt, call her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I was on vacation [recently],” Morgan says with a smile. “I was on the phone and on email with a dozen parents. Yeah, I’m never really \u003cem>off\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Livingston, Nurse Lori, as she’s known, tells families they don’t have to decide if their child is too sick for school. Just meet her or a member of her health staff in the school parking lot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You don’t even have to get out of the car. Just stay in the car,” Morgan tells families. “We’ll come out and check your child out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She may take their temperature, ask a few questions. If a child is truly sick, Morgan says, she helps families get a quick doctor’s appointment at the local health clinic. But, she laughs, “99% of the time they’re well enough to stay.” And so she walks them to class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Livingston schools, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63951/3-strategies-for-encouraging-dads-involvement-in-schools\">building relationships with families\u003c/a> isn’t a side project. It’s fundamental. And it isn’t just Morgan. Each school site employs a dedicated parent liaison. And at morning drop-off, kindergarten parents are allowed to enter the closed campus and walk their children to a waiting teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our families have a close connection to our schools\u003cem>,\u003c/em>” says Superintendent Andres Zamora, who is wrapping up his 15th year in Livingston.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>3. Making school a place children want to be\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Helping parents see the value of kindergarten and understand post-pandemic health rules can boost attendance, sure. But the most important thing schools can do is make sure kids \u003cem>want\u003c/em> to be there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>“\u003c/em>She is excited for school every morning,” says Erika Zurita, whose daughter is in kindergarten in Livingston. “This spring break, she kept asking me, ‘Are we going to school tomorrow? I miss my teacher, my school, my classmates.’ She loves it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63998\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1300px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-63998\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1300\" height=\"867\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6.jpeg 1300w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6-800x534.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6-1020x680.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6-160x107.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/kinder6-768x512.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1300px) 100vw, 1300px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lupe Fuentes (left) and Yesenia Covarrubias teach a lesson on courage. \u003ccite>(Preston Gannaway for NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>How in the world do you do that? Sujie Shin, with the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, says the research is clear: One of the best predictors of a child’s success in school is how they answer one, simple question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Is there an adult at school that cares about you? Yes or no? That’s it,” Shin says. “That’s the question that can tell you everything.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in Livingston, Shin says, it’s clear that teachers and school leaders share “this real intense focus on \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63861/how-to-build-mutually-respectful-relationships-with-students-from-day-1\">creating and maintaining relationships\u003c/a> every single moment possible.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At her school, Principal Mayte Ramírez waits outside during morning drop-off, the first face many kids see as they emerge from the bus or idling cars. She flits easily between English and Spanish, which puts many families at ease as more than 80% of the district’s children are Hispanic. It’s not uncommon to hear Ramírez call a child “my heart” or “mi corazón.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When an SUV pulls up a few minutes late, Ramírez finds a little boy in the back seat, folded into a ball of anxiety. He does not want to go to school, and his mother isn’t sure what to do. But Principal Ramírez knows him – and the boy knows her. She opens the rear door, leans all the way in and gently extends her hand to the little boy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Come and help me, my love,” Ramírez says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The little boy unfolds himself, takes his principal’s hand and steps out of the car. Ramírez repays his trust by walking him through the front gates and all the way to his classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the way, she assures him, “You’re gonna have a great day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Audio stories produced by Lauren Migaki\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "as-chronic-absenteeism-soars-in-schools-most-parents-arent-sure-what-it-is",
"title": "As 'Chronic Absenteeism' Soars in Schools, Most Parents Aren’t Sure What It Is",
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"headTitle": "As ‘Chronic Absenteeism’ Soars in Schools, Most Parents Aren’t Sure What It Is | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>As the school year comes to a close, one problem is plaguing educators across the country: chronic absenteeism. In 2023, roughly 1 student out of 4 was chronically absent across the school year. The problem is aligned with historic drops in reading and math scores nationwide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>School districts have launched campaigns with text messages and home visits in efforts to get students back in class. Educators have long been aware that missing 15, 20 days a year, or more, creates serious learning setbacks and puts students at a greater risk of dropping out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But parents – according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll – don’t yet see the urgency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only about a third of parents, our poll found, are able to properly define chronic absenteeism. Can you?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students have to miss only 10% of the school year to be considered chronically absent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Experts aren’t surprised by the poll results: “In general, the public doesn’t understand what it is and why it matters,” says Cecelia Leong, a vice president at Attendance Works, an advocacy group that seeks to reduce chronic absenteeism. “Parents aren’t used to hearing about it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The issue really rose to the forefront during the pandemic, and since 2020 the number of chronically absent students has ballooned: “We went from 8 million students to over 14.6 million chronically absent,” Leong says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She notes that absenteeism can creep up on parents: A student only has to miss two days of school a month to end up chronically absent, so parents often don’t see it happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Parents are slow to grasp the urgency\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Even when parents see absenteeism as a problem, they don’t always see it as \u003cem>their\u003c/em> problem: According to the NPR/Ipsos poll, only 6% of parents surveyed identified their child as chronically absent – but the numbers nationwide show a disconnect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Prior to the pandemic … about 15% of students would meet the definition of chronic absenteeism. And that rate grew to nearly 30% in the 21/22 school year,” says Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One very prominent explanation here that meets the evidence,” Dee says, “is that during the pandemic many children and parents simply began to see less value in regular school attendance.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scholars call it “norm erosion”: It essentially means students and parents fell out of the habit of school.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How sick is too sick for school?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Maritza Hernandez lives in Phoenix with her three children. Two are still in school – one is 7 and the other is 18. Her youngest struggles with bad allergies during parts of the year and, before the pandemic, that didn’t necessarily mean a sick day from school: “He could still go to school again with some Tylenol,” she recalls. “He’s good.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, after the pandemic, Hernandez adds, “I can’t send him to school because you might get somebody else sick. I don’t know if this is just allergies, or it might be worse.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s a single mom and says that, with all the challenges of getting her children fed and off to school, and herself to work, there are many days when her kids are late. “I’m guilty, she says. “I’m one of those parents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sometimes, she adds, when they’re too late, her kids are marked “absent.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hernandez calls the school or takes the time to go check them in at the office. But she says she’s normally waiting in a long line of parents to get a late pass – often making the kids even more tardy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nicole Wyglendowski says she gets it. She’s an elementary school teacher in Philadelphia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I’m not going to do here today is parent-blame,” she says. “They have a lot of other issues that they’re facing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She thinks keeping kids home when they’re sick is the right thing, and it’s not anyone’s fault. Her students “are missing school because we live in an area with bad air quality, right? So their asthma acts up and they’re not sure if it’s their asthma or if it’s their allergies or if it’s COVID.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She says that many factors: housing insecurity, transportation issues, having little siblings who need to stay home and receive care, can result in more students staying home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The poll asked parents about all kinds of issues facing K-12 education. Only 5% of parents and the general population saw absenteeism as a top worry. Their highest priority? Preparing students for the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mallory Newall, a vice president at Ipsos, sees potential there: “To prepare students adequately for the future, they need to be in the classroom. I think that could be a really effective and important linkage for parents that maybe parents in the public just aren’t making quite yet.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Experts say outreach and identifying the reasons keeping students out of the classroom is the best chance districts have of getting their students back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the major issues this year in education has been the alarming number of students who have missed 15 days or more of school. Some states have seen chronic absenteeism soar to more than 40% of their students. Educators are sounding alarm bells, but parents, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll, don’t see yet the urgency. NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo has the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: When asked to define the term chronic absenteeism, only about 1 in 3 parents in our poll could pick the right definition. Cecelia Leong says she isn’t surprised.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CECELIA LEONG: It’s easy to hear the definition that chronic absence is missing 10% of the school year and not translate it into everyday reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Leong is the vice president of programs at Attendance Works, a nonprofit that researches school attendance. She says absenteeism is sneaky. It creeps up on parents. A student only has to miss two days of school a month to end up chronically absent, so parents often don’t see it happening. In the years since 2020, the number has ballooned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEONG: We went from 8 million students to over 14.6 million chronically absent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Arizona, Alaska and Washington, D.C., have all seen absenteeism rates above 40% in recent years. The problem has aligned with historic drops in reading and math scores nationwide. Chronic absence has also long been a predictor of student dropout rates. Administrators are launching door-knocking or text campaigns in efforts to bring students back, but parents aren’t quite there yet, especially since the COVID shutdown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARITZA HERNANDEZ: Before the pandemic, like, the sniffles or his allergies or if he got sick, I’m like, he can still go to school. I gave him some Tylenol. He’s good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Maritza Hernandez lives in Phoenix with her three children. Two are still in school. One is 7, and the other is 18. Her youngest struggles with bad allergies during parts of the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HERNANDEZ: After the pandemic, I’m like, oh, no, I can’t send you to school ’cause you might get somebody else sick. I don’t know if this is just allergies, or it might be worse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: She’s a single mom and says even when her kids are well, things just start to stack up in the morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HERNANDEZ: I’m guilty. I’m one of those parents that take my kids late mostly every day – every day – and sometimes, they’re marked absent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: She calls the school or takes the time to go check them in at the office, but she’s normally waiting in a long line of parents to get a late pass, often making the kids even more tardy. Even when parents see absenteeism as a problem, they don’t always see it as their problem. According to the NPR/Ipsos poll, only 6% of parents surveyed identified their child as chronically absent, but the numbers nationwide show a disconnect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>THOMAS DEE: Prior to the pandemic, it was just under about 15% of students would meet the definition of chronic absenteeism, and that rate grew to nearly 30% in the 2021-22 school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Thomas Dee is an education professor at Stanford University. He’s studied chronic absence after the pandemic and the resulting dip in test scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DEE: One very prominent explanation here that meets the evidence is that during the pandemic, many children and parents simply began to see less value in regular school attendance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Scholars call it norm erosion – essentially, students and parents fell out of the habit of school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NICOLE WYGLENDOWSKI: What I’m not going to do here today is parent blame, right? They have a lot of other issues that they’re facing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Nicole Wyglendowski teaches elementary school in Philadelphia and knows that attendance is never a cut-and-dry issue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>WYGLENDOWSKI: My kids are missing school because we live in an area with bad air quality – right? – so their asthma acts up and they’re not sure if it’s their asthma or if it’s their allergies or if it’s COVID.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: She says that combined with things like housing insecurity, transportation issues, having little siblings who need to stay home and receive care, all result in more students staying home. Our poll asked parents about all kinds of issues facing K-12 education, and chronic absenteeism ranked last out of 12 topics, including bullying, gun violence, book bans and others. Only 5% of parents in the general population saw it as a top worry. Their highest priority? Preparing students for the future. Mallory Newall, a vice president at Ipsos, sees potential there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MALLORY NEWALL: To prepare students adequately for the future, they need to be in the classroom. I think that could be a really effective and important linkage for parents that maybe parents in the public just aren’t making quite yet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Experts say outreach and identifying the reasons keeping students out of the classroom is the best chance districts have of getting their students back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sequoia Carrillo, NPR News.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As the school year comes to a close, one problem is plaguing educators across the country: chronic absenteeism. In 2023, roughly 1 student out of 4 was chronically absent across the school year. The problem is aligned with historic drops in reading and math scores nationwide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>School districts have launched campaigns with text messages and home visits in efforts to get students back in class. Educators have long been aware that missing 15, 20 days a year, or more, creates serious learning setbacks and puts students at a greater risk of dropping out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But parents – according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll – don’t yet see the urgency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only about a third of parents, our poll found, are able to properly define chronic absenteeism. Can you?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students have to miss only 10% of the school year to be considered chronically absent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Experts aren’t surprised by the poll results: “In general, the public doesn’t understand what it is and why it matters,” says Cecelia Leong, a vice president at Attendance Works, an advocacy group that seeks to reduce chronic absenteeism. “Parents aren’t used to hearing about it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The issue really rose to the forefront during the pandemic, and since 2020 the number of chronically absent students has ballooned: “We went from 8 million students to over 14.6 million chronically absent,” Leong says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She notes that absenteeism can creep up on parents: A student only has to miss two days of school a month to end up chronically absent, so parents often don’t see it happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Parents are slow to grasp the urgency\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Even when parents see absenteeism as a problem, they don’t always see it as \u003cem>their\u003c/em> problem: According to the NPR/Ipsos poll, only 6% of parents surveyed identified their child as chronically absent – but the numbers nationwide show a disconnect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Prior to the pandemic … about 15% of students would meet the definition of chronic absenteeism. And that rate grew to nearly 30% in the 21/22 school year,” says Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One very prominent explanation here that meets the evidence,” Dee says, “is that during the pandemic many children and parents simply began to see less value in regular school attendance.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scholars call it “norm erosion”: It essentially means students and parents fell out of the habit of school.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How sick is too sick for school?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Maritza Hernandez lives in Phoenix with her three children. Two are still in school – one is 7 and the other is 18. Her youngest struggles with bad allergies during parts of the year and, before the pandemic, that didn’t necessarily mean a sick day from school: “He could still go to school again with some Tylenol,” she recalls. “He’s good.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, after the pandemic, Hernandez adds, “I can’t send him to school because you might get somebody else sick. I don’t know if this is just allergies, or it might be worse.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s a single mom and says that, with all the challenges of getting her children fed and off to school, and herself to work, there are many days when her kids are late. “I’m guilty, she says. “I’m one of those parents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sometimes, she adds, when they’re too late, her kids are marked “absent.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hernandez calls the school or takes the time to go check them in at the office. But she says she’s normally waiting in a long line of parents to get a late pass – often making the kids even more tardy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nicole Wyglendowski says she gets it. She’s an elementary school teacher in Philadelphia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I’m not going to do here today is parent-blame,” she says. “They have a lot of other issues that they’re facing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She thinks keeping kids home when they’re sick is the right thing, and it’s not anyone’s fault. Her students “are missing school because we live in an area with bad air quality, right? So their asthma acts up and they’re not sure if it’s their asthma or if it’s their allergies or if it’s COVID.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She says that many factors: housing insecurity, transportation issues, having little siblings who need to stay home and receive care, can result in more students staying home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The poll asked parents about all kinds of issues facing K-12 education. Only 5% of parents and the general population saw absenteeism as a top worry. Their highest priority? Preparing students for the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mallory Newall, a vice president at Ipsos, sees potential there: “To prepare students adequately for the future, they need to be in the classroom. I think that could be a really effective and important linkage for parents that maybe parents in the public just aren’t making quite yet.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Experts say outreach and identifying the reasons keeping students out of the classroom is the best chance districts have of getting their students back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the major issues this year in education has been the alarming number of students who have missed 15 days or more of school. Some states have seen chronic absenteeism soar to more than 40% of their students. Educators are sounding alarm bells, but parents, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll, don’t see yet the urgency. NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo has the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: When asked to define the term chronic absenteeism, only about 1 in 3 parents in our poll could pick the right definition. Cecelia Leong says she isn’t surprised.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CECELIA LEONG: It’s easy to hear the definition that chronic absence is missing 10% of the school year and not translate it into everyday reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Leong is the vice president of programs at Attendance Works, a nonprofit that researches school attendance. She says absenteeism is sneaky. It creeps up on parents. A student only has to miss two days of school a month to end up chronically absent, so parents often don’t see it happening. In the years since 2020, the number has ballooned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEONG: We went from 8 million students to over 14.6 million chronically absent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Arizona, Alaska and Washington, D.C., have all seen absenteeism rates above 40% in recent years. The problem has aligned with historic drops in reading and math scores nationwide. Chronic absence has also long been a predictor of student dropout rates. Administrators are launching door-knocking or text campaigns in efforts to bring students back, but parents aren’t quite there yet, especially since the COVID shutdown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARITZA HERNANDEZ: Before the pandemic, like, the sniffles or his allergies or if he got sick, I’m like, he can still go to school. I gave him some Tylenol. He’s good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Maritza Hernandez lives in Phoenix with her three children. Two are still in school. One is 7, and the other is 18. Her youngest struggles with bad allergies during parts of the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HERNANDEZ: After the pandemic, I’m like, oh, no, I can’t send you to school ’cause you might get somebody else sick. I don’t know if this is just allergies, or it might be worse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: She’s a single mom and says even when her kids are well, things just start to stack up in the morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HERNANDEZ: I’m guilty. I’m one of those parents that take my kids late mostly every day – every day – and sometimes, they’re marked absent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: She calls the school or takes the time to go check them in at the office, but she’s normally waiting in a long line of parents to get a late pass, often making the kids even more tardy. Even when parents see absenteeism as a problem, they don’t always see it as their problem. According to the NPR/Ipsos poll, only 6% of parents surveyed identified their child as chronically absent, but the numbers nationwide show a disconnect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>THOMAS DEE: Prior to the pandemic, it was just under about 15% of students would meet the definition of chronic absenteeism, and that rate grew to nearly 30% in the 2021-22 school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Thomas Dee is an education professor at Stanford University. He’s studied chronic absence after the pandemic and the resulting dip in test scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DEE: One very prominent explanation here that meets the evidence is that during the pandemic, many children and parents simply began to see less value in regular school attendance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Scholars call it norm erosion – essentially, students and parents fell out of the habit of school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NICOLE WYGLENDOWSKI: What I’m not going to do here today is parent blame, right? They have a lot of other issues that they’re facing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Nicole Wyglendowski teaches elementary school in Philadelphia and knows that attendance is never a cut-and-dry issue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>WYGLENDOWSKI: My kids are missing school because we live in an area with bad air quality – right? – so their asthma acts up and they’re not sure if it’s their asthma or if it’s their allergies or if it’s COVID.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: She says that combined with things like housing insecurity, transportation issues, having little siblings who need to stay home and receive care, all result in more students staying home. Our poll asked parents about all kinds of issues facing K-12 education, and chronic absenteeism ranked last out of 12 topics, including bullying, gun violence, book bans and others. Only 5% of parents in the general population saw it as a top worry. Their highest priority? Preparing students for the future. Mallory Newall, a vice president at Ipsos, sees potential there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MALLORY NEWALL: To prepare students adequately for the future, they need to be in the classroom. I think that could be a really effective and important linkage for parents that maybe parents in the public just aren’t making quite yet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Experts say outreach and identifying the reasons keeping students out of the classroom is the best chance districts have of getting their students back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sequoia Carrillo, NPR News.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Pandemic Aid for Schools Is Ending Soon. Many After-school Programs May Go With It",
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"content": "\u003cp>Fifth-grader Andreana Campbell and third-grader Kewon Wells are tending to a garden box after school at Eugene Field Elementary School in Tulsa, Okla.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want to try this kale,” Kewon says, pointing to one of their crops. He picks some off the plant and pops it in his mouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think you’re supposed to take the kale off, and you’re supposed to wash it!” Andreana tells him with a giggle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this after-school program, each participant gets a garden box to plan, decorate, plant and harvest from throughout the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s one of countless after-school programs across the country that rely on federal pandemic-era relief dollars known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funds. But those federal dollars are starting to expire this fall, leaving the future of many after-school programs – including the one at Eugene Field – up in the air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The unfortunate reality is that some of those programs are going to close,” says Erik Peterson, senior vice president for policy at the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His organization \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/Investments-in-Student-Recovery-2023.pdf\">analyzed\u003c/a> 6,300 school districts across all states and the District of Columbia, and found that those districts spent at least $8.1 billion in ESSER funds on after-school and summer programs. As a result, an estimated 4 million \u003cem>more \u003c/em>students were able to access these programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peterson says schools will need to find \u003ca href=\"https://toolkit.afterschoolalliance.org/sustaining-a-program/sustainability-federal-pandemic-funding/\">diverse funding streams\u003c/a> to sustain the after-school programming boom that temporary federal funds made possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s not going to be one funding stream that just comes in and takes over. It’s going to be a patchwork,” he explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even if schools do pull that off, he says “it’s not going to be enough to match” what the federal government was providing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of Tulsa’s afterschool programs are supported by an organization called \u003ca href=\"https://theopp.org/\">The Opp\u003c/a>. Leaders there say ESSER funds allowed The Opp to expand its program offerings from seven school sites to 63. It supports 450 programs across those schools. But once the ESSER funds are gone, that will shrink to just 75 programs, unless they can find funding on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The return on investment for after-school programs\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Peterson says quality after-school programs come with all kinds of benefits. Not only do they help foster relationships with trusted adults, but they also help students develop \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/Afterschool-Supports-Childrens-Well-Being-and-Healthy-Development-2023.pdf\">important skills\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Communication skills — both written and oral — learning to problem solve, learning to resolve conflicts with peers and with others,” Peterson explains. “And really, all those skills that employers look for in terms of so-called ‘21st-century skills’ or workforce skills, but also really the skills just anyone needs to be successful — both in school, but really, in life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A growing \u003ca href=\"https://escholarship.org/content/qt0995q98p/qt0995q98p_noSplash_15b19e239ae1edbd1414b4b3df8a6f8a.pdf\">body\u003c/a> of \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/COVID-recovery-national-Factsheet-020121.pdf\">research\u003c/a> shows students who participate in out-of school activities, including after-school programs, are more likely to have higher vocabulary scores, better reading comprehension, better math achievement and better social confidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These programs also provide a safe place for students to keep learning after the school day ends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had an opportunity to chat with a fourth-grade student as she was waiting for her chess club to begin,” says Lauren Sivak, executive director at \u003ca href=\"https://theopp.org/\">The Opp\u003c/a>. “And she said to me, ‘If I wasn’t here, I’d probably be home alone.’ And I have not forgotten that statement since those words left her mouth. And that is a big concern to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to The Opp’s data, students who participated in The Opp’s after-school programs were 43% less likely to be chronically absent — that’s when students miss at least 10% of school days in a school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sivak says these programs also provide a place where students can expand their interests and work on life skills without worrying about grades or other classroom pressures.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>When after-school funding competes with in-school needs\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Caroline Crouch, of Tulsa Public Schools, says prioritizing state dollars for after-school opportunities – over in-school ones – can be a tough sell. And in fact, in Oklahoma, lawmakers are focusing their funding priorities on teacher recruitment and retention, not filling the gaps for after-school programs once the ESSER money expires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crouch previously oversaw after-school programs for the district, and she currently works in the communications office. She says policymakers and donors need to know about the return on investment after-school programming provides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It feels to a lot of people like it’s soft and fuzzy, right? You know, this ain’t no reading, writing and arithmetic,” Crouch says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the district has seen the difference these programs can make for Tulsa students: “A few years ago, we had the first- or second-year [after-school] debate club at Walt Whitman Elementary. And every single student who was in their debate club did better on their English language [and] math assessments than they had before.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sivak, of The Opp, says she doesn’t think policymakers in Oklahoma will step in with funding unless they feel a sense of urgency from their communities — and that probably won’t happen until the programs go away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t know if the appetite for sustainable funding will be there until we see what is lost.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>After-school lessons in pesto\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>At Eugene Field Elementary, the after-school gardeners aren’t thinking about funding; they’re more focused on making a harvested carrot-top pesto spread.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students gather around a table to chop carrot greens, spinach, basil and kale. They add oil, lemon juice and garlic into a food processor, and garden educator Mary Smith talks through potential flavor profiles as she folds in the pesto with whipped butter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The students spread the pesto over slices of bread and take a bite. Many go back for seconds, and some for thirds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Afterward, Smith gathers the students on the carpeted floor and asks what they appreciated that day. Surrounded by gardening calendars, an enormous indoor grow tower, photos of the students in the garden and cooking supplies, the kids say they appreciate the teachers at this after-school program, the carrot-top pesto and getting to do a garden scavenger hunt earlier that afternoon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then they put their hands together and count off: “Three, two, one — pesto rocks!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Beth Wallis covers education for StateImpact Oklahoma.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Fifth-grader Andreana Campbell and third-grader Kewon Wells are tending to a garden box after school at Eugene Field Elementary School in Tulsa, Okla.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want to try this kale,” Kewon says, pointing to one of their crops. He picks some off the plant and pops it in his mouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think you’re supposed to take the kale off, and you’re supposed to wash it!” Andreana tells him with a giggle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this after-school program, each participant gets a garden box to plan, decorate, plant and harvest from throughout the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s one of countless after-school programs across the country that rely on federal pandemic-era relief dollars known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funds. But those federal dollars are starting to expire this fall, leaving the future of many after-school programs – including the one at Eugene Field – up in the air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The unfortunate reality is that some of those programs are going to close,” says Erik Peterson, senior vice president for policy at the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His organization \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/Investments-in-Student-Recovery-2023.pdf\">analyzed\u003c/a> 6,300 school districts across all states and the District of Columbia, and found that those districts spent at least $8.1 billion in ESSER funds on after-school and summer programs. As a result, an estimated 4 million \u003cem>more \u003c/em>students were able to access these programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peterson says schools will need to find \u003ca href=\"https://toolkit.afterschoolalliance.org/sustaining-a-program/sustainability-federal-pandemic-funding/\">diverse funding streams\u003c/a> to sustain the after-school programming boom that temporary federal funds made possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s not going to be one funding stream that just comes in and takes over. It’s going to be a patchwork,” he explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even if schools do pull that off, he says “it’s not going to be enough to match” what the federal government was providing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of Tulsa’s afterschool programs are supported by an organization called \u003ca href=\"https://theopp.org/\">The Opp\u003c/a>. Leaders there say ESSER funds allowed The Opp to expand its program offerings from seven school sites to 63. It supports 450 programs across those schools. But once the ESSER funds are gone, that will shrink to just 75 programs, unless they can find funding on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The return on investment for after-school programs\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Peterson says quality after-school programs come with all kinds of benefits. Not only do they help foster relationships with trusted adults, but they also help students develop \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/Afterschool-Supports-Childrens-Well-Being-and-Healthy-Development-2023.pdf\">important skills\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Communication skills — both written and oral — learning to problem solve, learning to resolve conflicts with peers and with others,” Peterson explains. “And really, all those skills that employers look for in terms of so-called ‘21st-century skills’ or workforce skills, but also really the skills just anyone needs to be successful — both in school, but really, in life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A growing \u003ca href=\"https://escholarship.org/content/qt0995q98p/qt0995q98p_noSplash_15b19e239ae1edbd1414b4b3df8a6f8a.pdf\">body\u003c/a> of \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/COVID-recovery-national-Factsheet-020121.pdf\">research\u003c/a> shows students who participate in out-of school activities, including after-school programs, are more likely to have higher vocabulary scores, better reading comprehension, better math achievement and better social confidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These programs also provide a safe place for students to keep learning after the school day ends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had an opportunity to chat with a fourth-grade student as she was waiting for her chess club to begin,” says Lauren Sivak, executive director at \u003ca href=\"https://theopp.org/\">The Opp\u003c/a>. “And she said to me, ‘If I wasn’t here, I’d probably be home alone.’ And I have not forgotten that statement since those words left her mouth. And that is a big concern to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to The Opp’s data, students who participated in The Opp’s after-school programs were 43% less likely to be chronically absent — that’s when students miss at least 10% of school days in a school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sivak says these programs also provide a place where students can expand their interests and work on life skills without worrying about grades or other classroom pressures.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>When after-school funding competes with in-school needs\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Caroline Crouch, of Tulsa Public Schools, says prioritizing state dollars for after-school opportunities – over in-school ones – can be a tough sell. And in fact, in Oklahoma, lawmakers are focusing their funding priorities on teacher recruitment and retention, not filling the gaps for after-school programs once the ESSER money expires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crouch previously oversaw after-school programs for the district, and she currently works in the communications office. She says policymakers and donors need to know about the return on investment after-school programming provides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It feels to a lot of people like it’s soft and fuzzy, right? You know, this ain’t no reading, writing and arithmetic,” Crouch says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the district has seen the difference these programs can make for Tulsa students: “A few years ago, we had the first- or second-year [after-school] debate club at Walt Whitman Elementary. And every single student who was in their debate club did better on their English language [and] math assessments than they had before.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sivak, of The Opp, says she doesn’t think policymakers in Oklahoma will step in with funding unless they feel a sense of urgency from their communities — and that probably won’t happen until the programs go away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t know if the appetite for sustainable funding will be there until we see what is lost.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>After-school lessons in pesto\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>At Eugene Field Elementary, the after-school gardeners aren’t thinking about funding; they’re more focused on making a harvested carrot-top pesto spread.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students gather around a table to chop carrot greens, spinach, basil and kale. They add oil, lemon juice and garlic into a food processor, and garden educator Mary Smith talks through potential flavor profiles as she folds in the pesto with whipped butter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The students spread the pesto over slices of bread and take a bite. Many go back for seconds, and some for thirds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Afterward, Smith gathers the students on the carpeted floor and asks what they appreciated that day. Surrounded by gardening calendars, an enormous indoor grow tower, photos of the students in the garden and cooking supplies, the kids say they appreciate the teachers at this after-school program, the carrot-top pesto and getting to do a garden scavenger hunt earlier that afternoon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then they put their hands together and count off: “Three, two, one — pesto rocks!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Beth Wallis covers education for StateImpact Oklahoma.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Schools spend \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66#:~:text=Question%3A,constant%202021%E2%80%9322%20dollars).\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">billions of dollars a year\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> on products and services, including everything from staplers and textbooks to teacher coaching and training. Does any of it help students learn more? Some educational materials end up \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/new-jersey-school-district-decided-giving-laptops-students-terrible-idea/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">mothballed in closets\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Much software goes \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/3-lessons-from-data-on-how-students-are-actually-using-educational-apps-and-software-at-school/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">unused\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Yet central-office bureaucrats frequently renew their contracts with outside vendors regardless of usage or efficacy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One idea for smarter education spending is for schools to sign smarter contracts, where part of the payment is contingent upon whether students use the services and learn more. It’s called \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/62445/denver-public-schools-pledged-to-pay-tutoring-vendors-based-on-their-results-did-it-work\">outcomes-based contracting\u003c/a> and is a way of sharing risk between buyer (the school) and seller (the vendor). Outcomes-based contracting is most \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10397909/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">common in healthcare\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. For example, a health insurer might pay a pharmaceutical company more for a drug if it actually improves people’s health, and less if it doesn’t. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Although the idea is relatively new in education, many schools tried a different version of it – evaluating and paying teachers based on how much their students’ test scores improved – in the 2010s. Teachers didn’t like it, and enthusiasm for these teacher accountability schemes waned. Then, in 2020, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://cepr.harvard.edu/obci\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> announced that it was going to test the feasibility of paying tutoring companies by how much students’ test scores improved. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The initiative was particularly timely in the wake of the pandemic. The federal government would eventually give schools almost $190 billion to reopen and to help students who fell behind when schools were closed. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/tag/tutoring\">Tutoring became a leading solution for academic recovery\u003c/a>, and schools contracted with outside companies to provide tutors. Many educators worried that billions could be wasted on low-quality tutors who didn’t help anyone. Could schools insist that tutoring companies make part of their payment contingent upon whether student achievement increased? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Harvard center recruited a handful of school districts who wanted to try an outcomes-based contract. The researchers and districts shared ideas on how to set performance targets. How much should they expect student achievement to grow from a few months of tutoring? How much of the contract should be guaranteed to the vendor for delivering tutors, and how much should be contingent on student performance? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The first hurdle was whether tutoring companies would be willing to offer services without knowing exactly how much they would be paid. School districts sent out requests for proposals from online tutoring companies. Tutoring companies bid and the terms varied. One online tutoring company agreed that 40% of a $1.2 million contract with the Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida, would be contingent upon student performance. Another online tutoring company signed a contract with Ector County schools in the Odessa, Texas, region that specified that the company had to accept a penalty if kids’ scores declined.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the middle of the pilot, the outcomes-based contracting initiative \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/raymondpierce/2022/03/21/school-district-contracting-can-be-a-lever-for-equity/?sh=56f02344280c\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">moved \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">from the Harvard center to the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://obc.southerneducation.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Southern Education Foundation\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, another nonprofit, and I recently learned how the first group of contracts panned out from Jasmine Walker, a senior manager there. Walker had a first-hand view because until the fall of 2023, she was the director of mathematics in Florida’s Duval County schools, where she oversaw the outcomes-based contract on tutoring. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here are some lessons she learned.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Planning is time-consuming\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Drawing up an outcomes-based contract requires analyzing years of historical testing data, and documenting how much achievement has typically grown for the students who need tutoring. Then, educators have to decide – based on the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/62921/four-lessons-from-post-pandemic-tutoring-research\">research evidence for tutoring\u003c/a> – how much they could reasonably hope student achievement to grow after 12 weeks or more. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Incomplete data was a common problem\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The first school district in the pilot group launched its outcomes-based contract in the fall of 2021. In the middle of the pilot, school leadership changed, layoffs hit, and the leaders of the tutoring initiative left the district. With no one in the district’s central office left to track it, there was no data on whether tutoring helped the 1,000 students who received it. Half the students attended 70% of the tutoring sessions. Half didn’t. Test scores for almost two-thirds of the tutored students increased between the start and the end of the tutoring program. But these students also had regular math classes each day and they likely would have posted some achievement gains anyway.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Delays in settling contracts led to fewer tutored students\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Walker said two school districts weren’t able to start tutoring children until January 2023, instead of the fall of 2022 as originally planned, because it took so long to iron out contract details and obtain approvals inside the districts. Many schools didn’t want to wait and launched other interventions to help needy students sooner. Understandably, schools didn’t want to yank these students away from those other interventions midyear. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That delay had big consequences in Duval County. Only 451 students received tutoring instead of a projected 1,200. Fewer students forced Walker to recalculate Duval’s outcomes-based contract. Instead of a $1.2 million contract with $480,000 of it contingent on student outcomes, she downsized it to $464,533 with $162,363 contingent. The tutored students hit 53% of the district’s growth and proficiency goals, leading to a total payout of $393,220 to the tutoring company – far less than the company had originally anticipated. But the average per-student payout of $872 was in line with the original terms of between $600 and $1,000 per student. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cb>The bottom line is still uncertain\u003c/b>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What we don’t know from any of these \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WOlpmB9qgDGtyzxVQCn8c9UWbp65fFTG/view\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">case studies\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is whether similar students who didn’t receive tutoring also made similar growth and proficiency gains. Maybe it’s all the other things that teachers were doing that made the difference. In Duval County, for example, proficiency rates in math rose from 28% of students to 46% of students. Walker believes that outcomes-based contracting for tutoring was “one lever” of many. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s unclear if outcomes-based contracting is a way for schools to save money. This kind of intensive tutoring – three times a week or more during the school day – is new and the school districts didn’t have previous pre-pandemic tutoring contracts for comparison. But generally, if all the student goals are met, companies stand to earn more in an outcomes-based contract than they would have otherwise, Walker said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It’s not really about saving money,” said Walker. “What we want is for students to achieve. I don’t care if I spent the whole contract amount if the students actually met the outcomes, because in the past, let’s face it, I was still paying, and they were not achieving outcomes.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The biggest change with outcomes-based contracting, Walker said, was the partnership with the provider. One contractor monitored student attendance during tutoring sessions, called her when attendance slipped and asked her to investigate. Students were given rewards for attending their tutoring sessions and the tutoring company even chipped in to pay for them. “Kids love \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://barcel-usa.com/takis\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Takis\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">,” said Walker. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cb>Advice for schools\u003c/b>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Walker has two pieces of advice for schools considering outcomes-based contracts. One, she says, is to make the contingency amount at least 40% of the contract. Smaller incentives may not motivate the vendor. For her second outcomes-based contract in Duval County, Walker boosted the contingency amount to half the contract. To earn it, the tutoring company needs the students it is tutoring to hit growth and proficiency goals. That tutoring took place during the current 2023-24 school year. Based on mid-year results, students exceeded expectations, but full-year results are not yet in. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">More importantly, Walker says the biggest lesson she learned was to include teachers, parents and students earlier in the contract negotiation process. She says buy-in from teachers is critical because classroom teachers are actually making sure the tutoring happens. Otherwise, an outcomes-based contract can feel like yet “another thing” that the central office is adding to a teacher’s workload. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Walker also said she wished she had spent more time educating parents and students on the importance of attending school and their tutoring sessions. ”It’s important that everyone understands the mission,” she said. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Innovation can be rocky, especially at the beginning. Now the Southern Education Foundation is working to expand its outcomes-based contracting initiative nationwide. A second group of four school districts launched its first outcomes-based contracts for tutoring this 2023-24 school year. Walker says that the rate cards and recordkeeping are improving from the first pilot round, which took place during the stress and chaos of the pandemic. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The foundation is also seeking to expand the use of outcomes-based contracts beyond tutoring to education technology and software. Nine districts are slated to launch outcomes-based contracts for ed tech this fall. Her next dream is to design outcomes-based contracts around curriculum and teacher training. I’ll be watching. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about\u003c/span>\u003c/i> \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-outcomes-based-contracting/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">outcomes-based contracting\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Schools spend \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66#:~:text=Question%3A,constant%202021%E2%80%9322%20dollars).\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">billions of dollars a year\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> on products and services, including everything from staplers and textbooks to teacher coaching and training. Does any of it help students learn more? Some educational materials end up \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/new-jersey-school-district-decided-giving-laptops-students-terrible-idea/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">mothballed in closets\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Much software goes \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/3-lessons-from-data-on-how-students-are-actually-using-educational-apps-and-software-at-school/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">unused\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Yet central-office bureaucrats frequently renew their contracts with outside vendors regardless of usage or efficacy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One idea for smarter education spending is for schools to sign smarter contracts, where part of the payment is contingent upon whether students use the services and learn more. It’s called \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/62445/denver-public-schools-pledged-to-pay-tutoring-vendors-based-on-their-results-did-it-work\">outcomes-based contracting\u003c/a> and is a way of sharing risk between buyer (the school) and seller (the vendor). Outcomes-based contracting is most \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10397909/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">common in healthcare\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. For example, a health insurer might pay a pharmaceutical company more for a drug if it actually improves people’s health, and less if it doesn’t. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Although the idea is relatively new in education, many schools tried a different version of it – evaluating and paying teachers based on how much their students’ test scores improved – in the 2010s. Teachers didn’t like it, and enthusiasm for these teacher accountability schemes waned. Then, in 2020, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://cepr.harvard.edu/obci\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> announced that it was going to test the feasibility of paying tutoring companies by how much students’ test scores improved. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The initiative was particularly timely in the wake of the pandemic. The federal government would eventually give schools almost $190 billion to reopen and to help students who fell behind when schools were closed. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/tag/tutoring\">Tutoring became a leading solution for academic recovery\u003c/a>, and schools contracted with outside companies to provide tutors. Many educators worried that billions could be wasted on low-quality tutors who didn’t help anyone. Could schools insist that tutoring companies make part of their payment contingent upon whether student achievement increased? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Harvard center recruited a handful of school districts who wanted to try an outcomes-based contract. The researchers and districts shared ideas on how to set performance targets. How much should they expect student achievement to grow from a few months of tutoring? How much of the contract should be guaranteed to the vendor for delivering tutors, and how much should be contingent on student performance? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The first hurdle was whether tutoring companies would be willing to offer services without knowing exactly how much they would be paid. School districts sent out requests for proposals from online tutoring companies. Tutoring companies bid and the terms varied. One online tutoring company agreed that 40% of a $1.2 million contract with the Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida, would be contingent upon student performance. Another online tutoring company signed a contract with Ector County schools in the Odessa, Texas, region that specified that the company had to accept a penalty if kids’ scores declined.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the middle of the pilot, the outcomes-based contracting initiative \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/raymondpierce/2022/03/21/school-district-contracting-can-be-a-lever-for-equity/?sh=56f02344280c\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">moved \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">from the Harvard center to the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://obc.southerneducation.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Southern Education Foundation\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, another nonprofit, and I recently learned how the first group of contracts panned out from Jasmine Walker, a senior manager there. Walker had a first-hand view because until the fall of 2023, she was the director of mathematics in Florida’s Duval County schools, where she oversaw the outcomes-based contract on tutoring. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here are some lessons she learned.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Planning is time-consuming\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Drawing up an outcomes-based contract requires analyzing years of historical testing data, and documenting how much achievement has typically grown for the students who need tutoring. Then, educators have to decide – based on the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/62921/four-lessons-from-post-pandemic-tutoring-research\">research evidence for tutoring\u003c/a> – how much they could reasonably hope student achievement to grow after 12 weeks or more. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Incomplete data was a common problem\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The first school district in the pilot group launched its outcomes-based contract in the fall of 2021. In the middle of the pilot, school leadership changed, layoffs hit, and the leaders of the tutoring initiative left the district. With no one in the district’s central office left to track it, there was no data on whether tutoring helped the 1,000 students who received it. Half the students attended 70% of the tutoring sessions. Half didn’t. Test scores for almost two-thirds of the tutored students increased between the start and the end of the tutoring program. But these students also had regular math classes each day and they likely would have posted some achievement gains anyway.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Delays in settling contracts led to fewer tutored students\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Walker said two school districts weren’t able to start tutoring children until January 2023, instead of the fall of 2022 as originally planned, because it took so long to iron out contract details and obtain approvals inside the districts. Many schools didn’t want to wait and launched other interventions to help needy students sooner. Understandably, schools didn’t want to yank these students away from those other interventions midyear. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That delay had big consequences in Duval County. Only 451 students received tutoring instead of a projected 1,200. Fewer students forced Walker to recalculate Duval’s outcomes-based contract. Instead of a $1.2 million contract with $480,000 of it contingent on student outcomes, she downsized it to $464,533 with $162,363 contingent. The tutored students hit 53% of the district’s growth and proficiency goals, leading to a total payout of $393,220 to the tutoring company – far less than the company had originally anticipated. But the average per-student payout of $872 was in line with the original terms of between $600 and $1,000 per student. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cb>The bottom line is still uncertain\u003c/b>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What we don’t know from any of these \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WOlpmB9qgDGtyzxVQCn8c9UWbp65fFTG/view\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">case studies\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is whether similar students who didn’t receive tutoring also made similar growth and proficiency gains. Maybe it’s all the other things that teachers were doing that made the difference. In Duval County, for example, proficiency rates in math rose from 28% of students to 46% of students. Walker believes that outcomes-based contracting for tutoring was “one lever” of many. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s unclear if outcomes-based contracting is a way for schools to save money. This kind of intensive tutoring – three times a week or more during the school day – is new and the school districts didn’t have previous pre-pandemic tutoring contracts for comparison. But generally, if all the student goals are met, companies stand to earn more in an outcomes-based contract than they would have otherwise, Walker said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It’s not really about saving money,” said Walker. “What we want is for students to achieve. I don’t care if I spent the whole contract amount if the students actually met the outcomes, because in the past, let’s face it, I was still paying, and they were not achieving outcomes.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The biggest change with outcomes-based contracting, Walker said, was the partnership with the provider. One contractor monitored student attendance during tutoring sessions, called her when attendance slipped and asked her to investigate. Students were given rewards for attending their tutoring sessions and the tutoring company even chipped in to pay for them. “Kids love \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://barcel-usa.com/takis\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Takis\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">,” said Walker. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cb>Advice for schools\u003c/b>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Walker has two pieces of advice for schools considering outcomes-based contracts. One, she says, is to make the contingency amount at least 40% of the contract. Smaller incentives may not motivate the vendor. For her second outcomes-based contract in Duval County, Walker boosted the contingency amount to half the contract. To earn it, the tutoring company needs the students it is tutoring to hit growth and proficiency goals. That tutoring took place during the current 2023-24 school year. Based on mid-year results, students exceeded expectations, but full-year results are not yet in. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">More importantly, Walker says the biggest lesson she learned was to include teachers, parents and students earlier in the contract negotiation process. She says buy-in from teachers is critical because classroom teachers are actually making sure the tutoring happens. Otherwise, an outcomes-based contract can feel like yet “another thing” that the central office is adding to a teacher’s workload. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Walker also said she wished she had spent more time educating parents and students on the importance of attending school and their tutoring sessions. ”It’s important that everyone understands the mission,” she said. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Innovation can be rocky, especially at the beginning. Now the Southern Education Foundation is working to expand its outcomes-based contracting initiative nationwide. A second group of four school districts launched its first outcomes-based contracts for tutoring this 2023-24 school year. Walker says that the rate cards and recordkeeping are improving from the first pilot round, which took place during the stress and chaos of the pandemic. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The foundation is also seeking to expand the use of outcomes-based contracts beyond tutoring to education technology and software. Nine districts are slated to launch outcomes-based contracts for ed tech this fall. Her next dream is to design outcomes-based contracts around curriculum and teacher training. I’ll be watching. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about\u003c/span>\u003c/i> \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-outcomes-based-contracting/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">outcomes-based contracting\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "these-teens-were-missing-too-much-school-heres-what-it-took-to-get-them-back",
"title": "These Teens Were Missing Too Much School. Here's What It Took to Get Them Back",
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"headTitle": "These Teens Were Missing Too Much School. Here’s What It Took to Get Them Back | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>Sophomore Neomi sits quietly in an office at her high school in a Colorado mountain town west of Denver. It’s a cold December morning and she’s wearing gold and black Nikes and a gray hoodie, pulled up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s surrounded by school staff and her mom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just wanna be really clear about the intention of this meeting. It’s not to make you feel bad,” says Dave, a school administrator.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What’s going on?” he asks Neomi. “Why aren’t we coming to school? Because you were coming to school quite a bit, and then all of a sudden…”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Neomi listens, tears roll down her cheeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do you not feel safe? Are you stressed?” Dave asks softly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, in a quiet voice, the teen says, “I don’t have friends. I don’t have any people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neomi has been chronically absent, which means, at the time of this meeting, she had already missed 10% or more of the school year. The teen is part of an alarming trend among the country’s K-12 students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chronic absenteeism skyrocketed nationwide during the pandemic. In the 2022-23 academic year, 26% of U.S. students were chronically absent, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/long-covid-for-public-schools-chronic-absenteeism-before-and-after-the-pandemic/\">research from the American Enterprise Institute\u003c/a> (AEI). Before the pandemic, only 15% of students were regularly missing school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In some places, like Colorado and Oregon, the rates of chronic absenteeism are even higher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Research has shown there’s a \u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/chronic-absenteeism-an-old-problem-in-search-of-new-answers/\">link between\u003c/a> irregular attendance and not graduating – and attendance \u003ca href=\"https://www2.ed.gov/datastory/chronicabsenteeism.html\">can be a better predictor\u003c/a> of a student’s drop-out risk than test scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The flip side of it [is] kids with high attendance are much more likely to stay on track and graduate with their peers,” says Johann Liljengren, director of dropout prevention for the Colorado Department of Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Going beyond academics to help solve absenteeism\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Getting chronically absent students back to class is a priority for schools. It requires support from families and teachers, as well as difficult, personal conversations – like the kind Dave and Neomi are having in Colorado.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR is only using the teen’s middle name so this conversation about her attendance doesn’t hurt future job or academic prospects. To further protect her identity, we aren’t naming her school or her mom, and we’re only using the administrator’s first name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neomi and her family came to Colorado from El Salvador. At the December meeting, a school staffer interprets for Neomi’s mom, who has been listening quietly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Dave points out that the teen hasn’t been in school much since Thanksgiving, Neomi’s mom speaks up to explain what her daughter has been going through.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She doesn’t want to come here because she was dating this kid and they broke up,” she says through the interpreter. “Everybody is bullying or laughing or talking: ‘Well, after being the perfect couple, look at you.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neomi’s mom tried to get help for her daughter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I was trying to find resources to try to find a therapist,” she says through the interpreter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dave tells her he can help with that. He knows, through student interviews, that health, including mental health, was among the top reasons around half of all students in this rural district were chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other reasons include family responsibilities, transportation issues and jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So everything from working at, you know, Walmart to helping parents with their cleaning businesses,” Dave explains. “They’re working till really late at night. And then, you know, getting up in the morning is tough.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Neomi, the hardest part of coming to school is running into students in the hallways and at lunchtime. With this key information, staffers get to work on some solutions that could help bring the teenager back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They offer to give her a pass to leave class early so she can avoid the students who have been teasing her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dave suggests finding a classroom where she can eat lunch, and school staff offer to stay in touch over a messaging app.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They try to get Neomi to stay for the rest of the school day, but she says she isn’t ready. Though she promises to come back on Monday, after the weekend.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>What it looks like to come back from absenteeism\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Anais and her mom agree Anais’ sophomore year was a low point in her high school career: She missed more than a month of classes, which set her back academically and put her at risk of not graduating on time, a common consequence of chronic absenteeism \u003ca href=\"https://www.ode.state.or.us/wma/researchschool-attendance--final-version.pdf\">in Oregon\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anais is currently a junior at David Douglas High School in southeast Portland, Ore. On a Friday after school back in February, the bubbly 17-year-old and her mom, Josette, are outside, in front of their apartment complex, joking around.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She and her mom go back and forth on how they’d grade Anais’ attendance last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Josette gives her daughter a D.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“From January to June, you were not there a lot,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anais is harder on herself: “I would say a D-minus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last school year, Anais was sick a lot, but, like Neomi, she was also going through a breakup. Both kept her from school for days at a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR is not using Anais’ full name so she can talk openly about her attendance without hurting future academic or job prospects. To further protect her identity, we also aren’t fully naming her mom, Josette.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chronic absenteeism at Anais’ high school was at 44% in 2023, well above AEI’s national average.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Anais, missing so much school hurt her grades and changed her friendships. She says her teachers tried to help – “The teachers really did try their best with me with not showing up” — but there wasn’t much they could do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this year has been different. Her attendance is back up, and Anais has been working on her grades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What changed? She hasn’t been sick as much this year – and she also got back together with her boyfriend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Josette doesn’t love that the boyfriend continues to play a role in her daughter’s attendance. She’s quick to remind Anais that school is a priority.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I do talk to her about not letting things get in the way of her education,” Josette says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After so many absences, getting back on track to graduate goes beyond just showing up. Anais has been taking a credit recovery class after school to make up for what she missed during her sophomore year. She plans to attend summer school too, if that’s what it takes to finish on time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Josette has faith her daughter will pull it off. If she does, Anais would be the first of her five siblings to graduate from a traditional high school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At that point, Anais jokes, “You’re pretty much a grown adult.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Back on track\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>One thing both Anais and her mom can agree on is how they’d grade Anais’ attendance \u003cem>this \u003c/em>school year: Both give it an A.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the school year winds down in Colorado, Neomi’s attendance has also turned around. Dave says she missed school the Monday after the meeting, but she did make it on Tuesday. Since then, she’s been coming to school a lot more. Recently the teenager had a two-week stretch of perfect attendance. Dave says school staff did a celebration dance in the hallway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kunc.org/people/leigh-paterson\">\u003cem>Leigh Paterson\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> covers youth mental health for KUNC in Northern Colorado, and \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.opb.org/author/elizabeth-miller/\">\u003cem>Elizabeth Miller\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> covers education for OPB in Portland, Ore.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Digital and audio stories edited by: Nicole Cohen\u003cbr>\nAudio stories produced by: Lauren Migaki\u003cbr>\nVisual design and development by: LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TAMARA KEITH, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the pandemic, an alarming number of K-12 students haven’t been going to school. Getting them back in the classroom takes support from both school and faculty. And for many teenagers, it also takes a real desire to go back. OPB’s Elizabeth Miller spoke to one teen in Portland, Ore., about her journey to better attendance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ELIZABETH MILLER, BYLINE: This is Anais.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: And I go to David Douglas High School, and I’m a 11th grader, so I’m a junior. (Laughter) I had to process that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Last year, Anais really struggled to make it to school. We aren’t using Anais’ full name, so she can talk openly about her attendance without hurting future academic or job prospects. To further protect her identity, we also aren’t fully naming her mom, Josette.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: Your attendance last year was not all that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: At home, Anais and Josette go back and forth on how they’d grade Anais’ attendance back then. Josette said she’d give her daughter a D. Anais is less generous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: I’d say a D-minus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: OK. January to June…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: I’d say a D-minus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: …You were not there a lot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: That’s what I’m saying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Like countless teenage daughters and mothers before them, neither will budge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: That’s why I’m saying a D-minus…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: OK, a D-minus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: …Not a D-plus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Chronic absenteeism exploded during the pandemic. And the numbers are still pretty bad. In 2023, about 1 in 4 U.S. students was chronically absent, according to research from the American Enterprise Institute. That means they’ve missed 10% or more of the school year. In Oregon, the numbers are even worse. About 200,000 Oregon students were chronically absent last school year. Anais was one of them. She says she was sick a lot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: Last year, it was more of being around – like, a lot of sick people don’t give it up (laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Judging from her mom’s reaction, that wasn’t the whole story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: What’s that look for? Bro, you just looked like you ate a lemon, and you were like, ugh (laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: She was sick a lot of the times, and I think a lot of it was there’s other issues behind that, her not going.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Anais and her boyfriend broke up in her sophomore year, and that kept Anais from wanting to go to school, so she didn’t. She missed over a month of classes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: The teachers really did try their best with me with not showing up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: But she still fell behind and fell out of touch with friends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: That definitely impact my grades and, like, me just being in class, my relationship with some of my friends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: This year has been different. Anais’ attendance has been much better, and she’s spent the past several months working on her grades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: I’m doing – I wouldn’t say a whole lot better, but, like, better because during finals, I really thought I was going to fail, and apparently I did really good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: She says there are a few main reasons she goes to school now. At David Douglas, if a student is on track to graduate, they can leave school early or arrive late. Anais is working towards that for her senior year. Also, she got back together with her boyfriend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: Three reasons – boyfriend, early release and late arrival.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: Yes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Josette is clearly concerned that the boyfriend still plays such a big role in her daughter’s attendance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: I do talk to her about not letting things get in the way of her education. Her education is more important, and, I mean, she’s a teenager.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: In Anais’ family, there’s a lot riding on her graduation. She’d be the first of her five siblings to graduate from a traditional high school, something that’s important to her mom. Even as Anais cracks jokes in the background, Josette is convinced her daughter will get there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: I have faith in her that she will graduate on time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: And if Anais does graduate on time, there’s a reward waiting for both her and her younger brother at the end, a trip out of the country, courtesy of Josette’s nephew and his girlfriend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: They might have to pitch in and help pay for the trip, but they have to finish on time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: And making it to graduation starts with making it to school and taking credit recovery after school to catch back up. It also means working on her grades, which haven’t always been great. But Anais says there is one area where her grade has improved – attendance. Last year, she gave herself a D-minus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: This year, I give it at least an A. I don’t know about a A-plus, though.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: I’d give it an A.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: For once, both mother and daughter agree.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For NPR News, I’m Elizabeth Miller in Portland.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Sophomore Neomi sits quietly in an office at her high school in a Colorado mountain town west of Denver. It’s a cold December morning and she’s wearing gold and black Nikes and a gray hoodie, pulled up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s surrounded by school staff and her mom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just wanna be really clear about the intention of this meeting. It’s not to make you feel bad,” says Dave, a school administrator.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What’s going on?” he asks Neomi. “Why aren’t we coming to school? Because you were coming to school quite a bit, and then all of a sudden…”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Neomi listens, tears roll down her cheeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do you not feel safe? Are you stressed?” Dave asks softly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, in a quiet voice, the teen says, “I don’t have friends. I don’t have any people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neomi has been chronically absent, which means, at the time of this meeting, she had already missed 10% or more of the school year. The teen is part of an alarming trend among the country’s K-12 students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chronic absenteeism skyrocketed nationwide during the pandemic. In the 2022-23 academic year, 26% of U.S. students were chronically absent, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/long-covid-for-public-schools-chronic-absenteeism-before-and-after-the-pandemic/\">research from the American Enterprise Institute\u003c/a> (AEI). Before the pandemic, only 15% of students were regularly missing school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In some places, like Colorado and Oregon, the rates of chronic absenteeism are even higher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Research has shown there’s a \u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/chronic-absenteeism-an-old-problem-in-search-of-new-answers/\">link between\u003c/a> irregular attendance and not graduating – and attendance \u003ca href=\"https://www2.ed.gov/datastory/chronicabsenteeism.html\">can be a better predictor\u003c/a> of a student’s drop-out risk than test scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The flip side of it [is] kids with high attendance are much more likely to stay on track and graduate with their peers,” says Johann Liljengren, director of dropout prevention for the Colorado Department of Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Going beyond academics to help solve absenteeism\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Getting chronically absent students back to class is a priority for schools. It requires support from families and teachers, as well as difficult, personal conversations – like the kind Dave and Neomi are having in Colorado.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR is only using the teen’s middle name so this conversation about her attendance doesn’t hurt future job or academic prospects. To further protect her identity, we aren’t naming her school or her mom, and we’re only using the administrator’s first name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neomi and her family came to Colorado from El Salvador. At the December meeting, a school staffer interprets for Neomi’s mom, who has been listening quietly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Dave points out that the teen hasn’t been in school much since Thanksgiving, Neomi’s mom speaks up to explain what her daughter has been going through.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She doesn’t want to come here because she was dating this kid and they broke up,” she says through the interpreter. “Everybody is bullying or laughing or talking: ‘Well, after being the perfect couple, look at you.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neomi’s mom tried to get help for her daughter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I was trying to find resources to try to find a therapist,” she says through the interpreter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dave tells her he can help with that. He knows, through student interviews, that health, including mental health, was among the top reasons around half of all students in this rural district were chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other reasons include family responsibilities, transportation issues and jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So everything from working at, you know, Walmart to helping parents with their cleaning businesses,” Dave explains. “They’re working till really late at night. And then, you know, getting up in the morning is tough.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Neomi, the hardest part of coming to school is running into students in the hallways and at lunchtime. With this key information, staffers get to work on some solutions that could help bring the teenager back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They offer to give her a pass to leave class early so she can avoid the students who have been teasing her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dave suggests finding a classroom where she can eat lunch, and school staff offer to stay in touch over a messaging app.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They try to get Neomi to stay for the rest of the school day, but she says she isn’t ready. Though she promises to come back on Monday, after the weekend.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>What it looks like to come back from absenteeism\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Anais and her mom agree Anais’ sophomore year was a low point in her high school career: She missed more than a month of classes, which set her back academically and put her at risk of not graduating on time, a common consequence of chronic absenteeism \u003ca href=\"https://www.ode.state.or.us/wma/researchschool-attendance--final-version.pdf\">in Oregon\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anais is currently a junior at David Douglas High School in southeast Portland, Ore. On a Friday after school back in February, the bubbly 17-year-old and her mom, Josette, are outside, in front of their apartment complex, joking around.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She and her mom go back and forth on how they’d grade Anais’ attendance last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Josette gives her daughter a D.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“From January to June, you were not there a lot,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anais is harder on herself: “I would say a D-minus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last school year, Anais was sick a lot, but, like Neomi, she was also going through a breakup. Both kept her from school for days at a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR is not using Anais’ full name so she can talk openly about her attendance without hurting future academic or job prospects. To further protect her identity, we also aren’t fully naming her mom, Josette.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chronic absenteeism at Anais’ high school was at 44% in 2023, well above AEI’s national average.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Anais, missing so much school hurt her grades and changed her friendships. She says her teachers tried to help – “The teachers really did try their best with me with not showing up” — but there wasn’t much they could do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this year has been different. Her attendance is back up, and Anais has been working on her grades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What changed? She hasn’t been sick as much this year – and she also got back together with her boyfriend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Josette doesn’t love that the boyfriend continues to play a role in her daughter’s attendance. She’s quick to remind Anais that school is a priority.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I do talk to her about not letting things get in the way of her education,” Josette says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After so many absences, getting back on track to graduate goes beyond just showing up. Anais has been taking a credit recovery class after school to make up for what she missed during her sophomore year. She plans to attend summer school too, if that’s what it takes to finish on time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Josette has faith her daughter will pull it off. If she does, Anais would be the first of her five siblings to graduate from a traditional high school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At that point, Anais jokes, “You’re pretty much a grown adult.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Back on track\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>One thing both Anais and her mom can agree on is how they’d grade Anais’ attendance \u003cem>this \u003c/em>school year: Both give it an A.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the school year winds down in Colorado, Neomi’s attendance has also turned around. Dave says she missed school the Monday after the meeting, but she did make it on Tuesday. Since then, she’s been coming to school a lot more. Recently the teenager had a two-week stretch of perfect attendance. Dave says school staff did a celebration dance in the hallway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kunc.org/people/leigh-paterson\">\u003cem>Leigh Paterson\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> covers youth mental health for KUNC in Northern Colorado, and \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.opb.org/author/elizabeth-miller/\">\u003cem>Elizabeth Miller\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> covers education for OPB in Portland, Ore.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Digital and audio stories edited by: Nicole Cohen\u003cbr>\nAudio stories produced by: Lauren Migaki\u003cbr>\nVisual design and development by: LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TAMARA KEITH, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the pandemic, an alarming number of K-12 students haven’t been going to school. Getting them back in the classroom takes support from both school and faculty. And for many teenagers, it also takes a real desire to go back. OPB’s Elizabeth Miller spoke to one teen in Portland, Ore., about her journey to better attendance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ELIZABETH MILLER, BYLINE: This is Anais.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: And I go to David Douglas High School, and I’m a 11th grader, so I’m a junior. (Laughter) I had to process that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Last year, Anais really struggled to make it to school. We aren’t using Anais’ full name, so she can talk openly about her attendance without hurting future academic or job prospects. To further protect her identity, we also aren’t fully naming her mom, Josette.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: Your attendance last year was not all that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: At home, Anais and Josette go back and forth on how they’d grade Anais’ attendance back then. Josette said she’d give her daughter a D. Anais is less generous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: I’d say a D-minus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: OK. January to June…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: I’d say a D-minus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: …You were not there a lot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: That’s what I’m saying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Like countless teenage daughters and mothers before them, neither will budge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: That’s why I’m saying a D-minus…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: OK, a D-minus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: …Not a D-plus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Chronic absenteeism exploded during the pandemic. And the numbers are still pretty bad. In 2023, about 1 in 4 U.S. students was chronically absent, according to research from the American Enterprise Institute. That means they’ve missed 10% or more of the school year. In Oregon, the numbers are even worse. About 200,000 Oregon students were chronically absent last school year. Anais was one of them. She says she was sick a lot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: Last year, it was more of being around – like, a lot of sick people don’t give it up (laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Judging from her mom’s reaction, that wasn’t the whole story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: What’s that look for? Bro, you just looked like you ate a lemon, and you were like, ugh (laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: She was sick a lot of the times, and I think a lot of it was there’s other issues behind that, her not going.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Anais and her boyfriend broke up in her sophomore year, and that kept Anais from wanting to go to school, so she didn’t. She missed over a month of classes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: The teachers really did try their best with me with not showing up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: But she still fell behind and fell out of touch with friends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: That definitely impact my grades and, like, me just being in class, my relationship with some of my friends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: This year has been different. Anais’ attendance has been much better, and she’s spent the past several months working on her grades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: I’m doing – I wouldn’t say a whole lot better, but, like, better because during finals, I really thought I was going to fail, and apparently I did really good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: She says there are a few main reasons she goes to school now. At David Douglas, if a student is on track to graduate, they can leave school early or arrive late. Anais is working towards that for her senior year. Also, she got back together with her boyfriend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: Three reasons – boyfriend, early release and late arrival.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: Yes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: Josette is clearly concerned that the boyfriend still plays such a big role in her daughter’s attendance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: I do talk to her about not letting things get in the way of her education. Her education is more important, and, I mean, she’s a teenager.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: In Anais’ family, there’s a lot riding on her graduation. She’d be the first of her five siblings to graduate from a traditional high school, something that’s important to her mom. Even as Anais cracks jokes in the background, Josette is convinced her daughter will get there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: I have faith in her that she will graduate on time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: And if Anais does graduate on time, there’s a reward waiting for both her and her younger brother at the end, a trip out of the country, courtesy of Josette’s nephew and his girlfriend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: They might have to pitch in and help pay for the trip, but they have to finish on time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: And making it to graduation starts with making it to school and taking credit recovery after school to catch back up. It also means working on her grades, which haven’t always been great. But Anais says there is one area where her grade has improved – attendance. Last year, she gave herself a D-minus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANAIS: This year, I give it at least an A. I don’t know about a A-plus, though.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JOSETTE: I’d give it an A.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MILLER: For once, both mother and daughter agree.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For NPR News, I’m Elizabeth Miller in Portland.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "How COVID-19 Narrowed the STEM Pipeline",
"headTitle": "How COVID-19 Narrowed the STEM Pipeline | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp class=\"p7\">Universities, philanthropies and even the U.S. government are all trying to encourage more young Americans to pursue careers in STEM, an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Many business sectors, from high tech to manufacturing, are plagued with \u003ca href=\"https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/understanding-the-gaps-in-the-us-stem-labor-market/\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">shortages of workers with technical skills\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. In New York City, where I live, the subway is frequently plastered with \u003ca href=\"https://www.rit.edu/news/rit-expands-advertising-new-york-citys-grand-central-station-and-metro-north-rail-lines\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">advertisements\u003c/span>\u003c/a> carrying the message that \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/DKThomp/status/1769363055341604947?s=20\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">STEM fields pay well\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. But studying STEM requires more than an interest in science or a desire to make good money. Students also need adequate training, even in elementary and middle school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">That’s why it’s concerning that high-achieving students, who’ve received less public attention than lower achieving students, were also set back by remote learning and pandemic uncertainty. Fewer students with math skills shrinks the pool of people who are likely to cultivate an expertise in science, engineering and technology a decade from now. In other words, the STEM pipeline – a metaphor for the development of future scientists, engineers and other high tech workers – likely starts with a narrower funnel in the post-pandemic era.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The stakes are high not only for Gen Z, as they age out of school and enter the workforce, but also for the future of the U.S. economy, which needs skilled scientists and engineers to grow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The leading indicators of STEM troubles ahead are apparent within the 2022 scores from a national test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The immediate headlines from that first post-pandemic test focused on the fact that two decades of academic progress had been suddenly erased. Low-achieving children, who tend to be poor, had lost the most ground. An alarming number of American children – as high as \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/nation/achievement/?grade=8\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">38%\u003c/span>\u003c/a> of eighth graders – were functioning below the “basic” level in math, meaning that they didn’t have even the most rudimentary math skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Statisticians at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) have continued to dig into the 2022 data, and they’ve been also turning their attention to students at the top. These children are on grade level, but the eighth grade NAEP assessment shows that far fewer of them are hitting an advanced performance level, or even a proficient one. Math scores among top performers dropped as steeply as scores did among low performers. Even the scores of students at Catholic schools, who otherwise weathered the pandemic well, plummeted in eighth grade math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">We don’t have data for other private schools because they have refused to participate in NAEP testing, but the eighth grade math declines among both high-achieving public school and Catholic school students are not good signs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">NAEP tests reading and math in both fourth and eighth grades every two years in order to track educational progress. It’s one of the only tests that can be used for comparisons across states and generations. More than \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/?grade=4\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">400,000 students\u003c/span>\u003c/a> are specially selected to represent the regions and demographic characteristics of the nation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Among the four NAEP tests, eighth grade math showed the sharpest pandemic drop. Math took a bigger hit than reading because kids can still read at home, while math is something that students primarily learn at school. If you didn’t read “The Hobbit” in your seventh grade English class because you were out sick with Covid, you can still be a good lifelong reader But not getting enough practice with rates, ratios and percentages in middle school can derail someone who might have otherwise excelled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Why eighth grade math was hit harder than fourth grade math is a bit less obvious. One explanation is that the concepts that students need to learn are more difficult. Square roots and exponents are possibly more challenging to master than multiplication and division. And fewer parents are able to assist with homework as the math increases in complexity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Yet another explanation is a psychological one. These eighth graders were in sixth grade when the pandemic erupted in the spring of 2020. This is a critical time in adolescent development when children are figuring out who they are and where they belong. A lot of this development occurs through social interaction. The isolation may have stunted psychological development and that ultimately affected motivation, study skills and the ability to delay gratification – all necessary to excel in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Let’s walk through the numbers together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p8\">\u003cb>Highest achieving students lost ground in eighth grade math\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63378\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-63378\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-800x437.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"437\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-800x437.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-1020x557.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-160x87.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-768x419.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1.png 1410w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">chart\u003c/span> shows that the highest performing students, those at the top 10% and the top 25%, lost as much as low-achieving students at the bottom in eighth grade math. These eighth graders were in the spring of sixth grade when the pandemic hit in 2020, and it’s possible that they didn’t master important prerequisite skills, such as rates and ratios. These kids at the top are performing at grade level, but not as high performing as past eighth graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p8\">\u003cb>Fewer eighth grade students hit advanced and proficient levels\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63379\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-63379\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-800x175.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"175\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-800x175.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-1020x223.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-160x35.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-768x168.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1.png 1364w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">bar chart\u003c/span> shows that before the pandemic 10% of the nation’s eighth graders were performing at an advanced level in math. That fell to 7%. And the number of students deemed proficient in eighth grade math fell even more, from 24% to 20%. Before the pandemic, arguably, 34% of the eighth grade population was on track to pursue advanced math in high school and a future STEM career if they wanted one. After the pandemic in 2022, only 27% were well prepared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Students at Catholic schools are generally much higher performing than students at public schools. In large part, that’s because of family income; wealthier students tend to have higher test scores than poorer students. Catholic school students tend to be wealthier; their families can afford private school tuition. In recent years, the Catholic Church has closed hundreds of schools that catered to low-income families, leaving a higher income population in its remaining classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">\u003cb>Catholic schools outperformed public schools but also dropped \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63377\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 780px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-63377\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"780\" height=\"414\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4.png 780w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4-160x85.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4-768x408.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">chart\u003c/span> shows that Catholic school students, depicted by the diamonds, outperformed public school students, depicted by the circles, in eighth grade math. But it was still a sharp five-point decline in eighth grade math performance for Catholic school students, almost as large as the eight-point decline for public school students. Scores of white students at Catholic schools declined five points; scores of students at Catholic schools in the suburbs declined seven points. Almost a quarter of Catholic school students are now functioning below a basic level in math for their grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Despite the good academic reputation of Catholic schools and the praise Catholic schools received for resuming in-person instruction sooner, math scores suggest a problem. And it’s a problem that potentially extends to the whole private school universe, where \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgc/private-school-enrollment\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">9% of students are enrolled\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, according to the most recently available data from 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">I talked with Ron Reynolds, the executive director of the California Association of Private School Organizations, who explained that not just Catholic schools, but also many other private schools suffered even if they hadn’t been closed for long. Reynolds said that private schools were still hit by illnesses, deaths and absences and that might have affected instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">“Private schools are tightly knit communities in which teachers tend to be more intertwined in the lives of the children and families they serve,” he said. “When you have a crisis, and so many people experiencing stress and loss, that can certainly impact the teacher in some significant ways.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how other private schools fared during the pandemic because they have refused to participate in the NAEP tests for the past decade. Reynolds, who serves on the governing board that oversees the NAEP exam, has been trying to lobby more private schools to participate, but so far, to no avail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Together private schools, selective public schools and affluent suburban schools have been important training grounds for the nation’s future scientists and engineers. Of course, it is possible that these high achieving students, now 10th graders, will catch up. Many of them are from wealthier families who can afford tutors, or attend well-resourced schools. But I am not seeing much evidence that schools have had the ability to think about the pipeline of advanced students when many students are so needy. And with post-pandemic grade inflation, students and parents may not be getting the signals they need to seek extra help independently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The administration of the 2024 NAEP test wrapped up in March, but results won’t be known for many months. I’ll be keeping an eye on eighth grade math and on SAT, ACT and Advanced Placement scores in the years to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">\u003ci>This story about\u003c/i> \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-how-covid-narrowed-the-stem-pipeline/\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">\u003ci>math scores\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003ci> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/i>The Hechinger Report\u003ci>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the \u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">\u003ci>Proof Points newsletter\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"p7\">Universities, philanthropies and even the U.S. government are all trying to encourage more young Americans to pursue careers in STEM, an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Many business sectors, from high tech to manufacturing, are plagued with \u003ca href=\"https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/understanding-the-gaps-in-the-us-stem-labor-market/\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">shortages of workers with technical skills\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. In New York City, where I live, the subway is frequently plastered with \u003ca href=\"https://www.rit.edu/news/rit-expands-advertising-new-york-citys-grand-central-station-and-metro-north-rail-lines\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">advertisements\u003c/span>\u003c/a> carrying the message that \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/DKThomp/status/1769363055341604947?s=20\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">STEM fields pay well\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. But studying STEM requires more than an interest in science or a desire to make good money. Students also need adequate training, even in elementary and middle school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">That’s why it’s concerning that high-achieving students, who’ve received less public attention than lower achieving students, were also set back by remote learning and pandemic uncertainty. Fewer students with math skills shrinks the pool of people who are likely to cultivate an expertise in science, engineering and technology a decade from now. In other words, the STEM pipeline – a metaphor for the development of future scientists, engineers and other high tech workers – likely starts with a narrower funnel in the post-pandemic era.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The stakes are high not only for Gen Z, as they age out of school and enter the workforce, but also for the future of the U.S. economy, which needs skilled scientists and engineers to grow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The leading indicators of STEM troubles ahead are apparent within the 2022 scores from a national test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The immediate headlines from that first post-pandemic test focused on the fact that two decades of academic progress had been suddenly erased. Low-achieving children, who tend to be poor, had lost the most ground. An alarming number of American children – as high as \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/nation/achievement/?grade=8\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">38%\u003c/span>\u003c/a> of eighth graders – were functioning below the “basic” level in math, meaning that they didn’t have even the most rudimentary math skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Statisticians at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) have continued to dig into the 2022 data, and they’ve been also turning their attention to students at the top. These children are on grade level, but the eighth grade NAEP assessment shows that far fewer of them are hitting an advanced performance level, or even a proficient one. Math scores among top performers dropped as steeply as scores did among low performers. Even the scores of students at Catholic schools, who otherwise weathered the pandemic well, plummeted in eighth grade math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">We don’t have data for other private schools because they have refused to participate in NAEP testing, but the eighth grade math declines among both high-achieving public school and Catholic school students are not good signs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">NAEP tests reading and math in both fourth and eighth grades every two years in order to track educational progress. It’s one of the only tests that can be used for comparisons across states and generations. More than \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/?grade=4\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">400,000 students\u003c/span>\u003c/a> are specially selected to represent the regions and demographic characteristics of the nation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Among the four NAEP tests, eighth grade math showed the sharpest pandemic drop. Math took a bigger hit than reading because kids can still read at home, while math is something that students primarily learn at school. If you didn’t read “The Hobbit” in your seventh grade English class because you were out sick with Covid, you can still be a good lifelong reader But not getting enough practice with rates, ratios and percentages in middle school can derail someone who might have otherwise excelled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Why eighth grade math was hit harder than fourth grade math is a bit less obvious. One explanation is that the concepts that students need to learn are more difficult. Square roots and exponents are possibly more challenging to master than multiplication and division. And fewer parents are able to assist with homework as the math increases in complexity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Yet another explanation is a psychological one. These eighth graders were in sixth grade when the pandemic erupted in the spring of 2020. This is a critical time in adolescent development when children are figuring out who they are and where they belong. A lot of this development occurs through social interaction. The isolation may have stunted psychological development and that ultimately affected motivation, study skills and the ability to delay gratification – all necessary to excel in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Let’s walk through the numbers together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p8\">\u003cb>Highest achieving students lost ground in eighth grade math\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63378\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-63378\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-800x437.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"437\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-800x437.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-1020x557.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-160x87.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-768x419.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1.png 1410w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">chart\u003c/span> shows that the highest performing students, those at the top 10% and the top 25%, lost as much as low-achieving students at the bottom in eighth grade math. These eighth graders were in the spring of sixth grade when the pandemic hit in 2020, and it’s possible that they didn’t master important prerequisite skills, such as rates and ratios. These kids at the top are performing at grade level, but not as high performing as past eighth graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p8\">\u003cb>Fewer eighth grade students hit advanced and proficient levels\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63379\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-63379\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-800x175.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"175\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-800x175.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-1020x223.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-160x35.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-768x168.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1.png 1364w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">bar chart\u003c/span> shows that before the pandemic 10% of the nation’s eighth graders were performing at an advanced level in math. That fell to 7%. And the number of students deemed proficient in eighth grade math fell even more, from 24% to 20%. Before the pandemic, arguably, 34% of the eighth grade population was on track to pursue advanced math in high school and a future STEM career if they wanted one. After the pandemic in 2022, only 27% were well prepared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Students at Catholic schools are generally much higher performing than students at public schools. In large part, that’s because of family income; wealthier students tend to have higher test scores than poorer students. Catholic school students tend to be wealthier; their families can afford private school tuition. In recent years, the Catholic Church has closed hundreds of schools that catered to low-income families, leaving a higher income population in its remaining classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">\u003cb>Catholic schools outperformed public schools but also dropped \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63377\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 780px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-63377\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"780\" height=\"414\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4.png 780w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4-160x85.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4-768x408.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">chart\u003c/span> shows that Catholic school students, depicted by the diamonds, outperformed public school students, depicted by the circles, in eighth grade math. But it was still a sharp five-point decline in eighth grade math performance for Catholic school students, almost as large as the eight-point decline for public school students. Scores of white students at Catholic schools declined five points; scores of students at Catholic schools in the suburbs declined seven points. Almost a quarter of Catholic school students are now functioning below a basic level in math for their grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Despite the good academic reputation of Catholic schools and the praise Catholic schools received for resuming in-person instruction sooner, math scores suggest a problem. And it’s a problem that potentially extends to the whole private school universe, where \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgc/private-school-enrollment\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">9% of students are enrolled\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, according to the most recently available data from 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">I talked with Ron Reynolds, the executive director of the California Association of Private School Organizations, who explained that not just Catholic schools, but also many other private schools suffered even if they hadn’t been closed for long. Reynolds said that private schools were still hit by illnesses, deaths and absences and that might have affected instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">“Private schools are tightly knit communities in which teachers tend to be more intertwined in the lives of the children and families they serve,” he said. “When you have a crisis, and so many people experiencing stress and loss, that can certainly impact the teacher in some significant ways.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how other private schools fared during the pandemic because they have refused to participate in the NAEP tests for the past decade. Reynolds, who serves on the governing board that oversees the NAEP exam, has been trying to lobby more private schools to participate, but so far, to no avail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Together private schools, selective public schools and affluent suburban schools have been important training grounds for the nation’s future scientists and engineers. Of course, it is possible that these high achieving students, now 10th graders, will catch up. Many of them are from wealthier families who can afford tutors, or attend well-resourced schools. But I am not seeing much evidence that schools have had the ability to think about the pipeline of advanced students when many students are so needy. And with post-pandemic grade inflation, students and parents may not be getting the signals they need to seek extra help independently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The administration of the 2024 NAEP test wrapped up in March, but results won’t be known for many months. I’ll be keeping an eye on eighth grade math and on SAT, ACT and Advanced Placement scores in the years to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"tagline": "Art is where you find it",
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"soldout": {
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