At East Oakland Pride Elementary School in Oakland, California, some fifth graders are asked to arrange colorful plastic counters into two rows of four, with three off to the side.
One student stacks up the counters instead, while another watches and giggles.
“Can someone tell me what expression we just made?” asks Yvette Munguia, the math tutor leading the lesson. “What is two times four?”
“Eight,” murmurs one student.
“Plus three?” she asks.
Silence.
With Munguia’s patient coaching, the students — who scored several grades below the 5th-grade level in math — work their way through the exercise. As they work together on the order of operations, they take long pauses to puzzle over basic addition and subtraction.
Munguia is one of more than 20 math tutors working in Oakland Unified Schools this year. Called math “Liberators,” tutors like Munguia were recruited and trained as part of a partnership between the school district and the nonprofit Oakland REACH. The parent-led math tutoring model follows the success of the Oakland REACH’s Literacy Liberator program, which produced similar gains in reading as instruction from classroom teachers, according to a 2023 report.
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Oakland REACH and district staff trained tutors based on the National Student Support Accelerator’s high-impact tutoring program, which requires weekly small-group support, close monitoring of student progress, alignment with district curriculum and oversight by school staff.
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