Since 2022, public schools in the District of Columbia have been working to mitigate Covid learning disruptions by establishing and ramping up high-impact tutoring (HIT) efforts. Data on the outcome of these efforts are beginning to emerge, and a new report from the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) shows some minimally encouraging signs.
NSSA is an offshoot of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and Systems Change for Advancing Learning and Equity, an initiative focused on researching how tutoring can best benefit students. Its new report looks at the first full year of HIT implementation in D.C. schools during 2022–23. Tutoring efforts that year concentrated on math and English language arts (ELA) for students in all grades and was focused on schools—both district and charter—with the greatest concentrations of students identified as at risk. It’s interesting to note that “at risk” doesn’t generally mean academic risk for schools in the district, but rather centers primarily on student socioeconomic status and homelessness, in the context of this wholly-academic intervention. Pre-existing academic need appears not to have been a driving force in choosing where tutors were placed, although some data suggest that academic performance may have influenced teachers’ decisions on which students to refer for tutoring.
A total of 5,135 students in 151 schools received HIT. Eligible buildings were those in which 40 percent or more of their students were categorized as at risk. Approximately 52 percent receiving HIT were district (DCPS) students, with charter school students making up the remainder. Overall, 6 percent of all D.C. public school students—and just 8 percent of all students categorized as at risk—received HIT. Of these students, 3,240 received tutoring in ELA and 2,558 in math. Tutoring hours received were highest in grades K–2, falling off starting in grade three. High school freshmen and seniors received the fewest hours of tutoring. Students, on average, participated in twenty-seven individual sessions. Seventy percent of students participated in eleven or more tutoring sessions. The report includes some details on the widely varying types of tutoring offered.
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