Here’s a plan to fix the COVID-19 education backslide. Could it work in Fort Worth?

Last July, Fort Worth Superintendent Kent Scribner warned of “historic academic regression” as a result of school shutdowns forced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As evidence of the pandemic’s academic effects nationwide has piled up, district leaders in Fort Worth have discussed the need for a multi-year plan to help students who have been most deeply affected by the shutdowns and the weaknesses of online learning. But what would such a plan look like?

One option to consider would involve adding a half hour to the school day and mobilizing college students, high school students and volunteers to serve as tutors for every student in the district. It’s an idea developed by researchers at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Their plan proposes a nationwide initiative that connects every student with intensive, small-group tutoring. Although the plan is written at the national scale, one of its authors said states or school districts could adopt many of the plan’s components to help students recover from the effects of the pandemic.

“Now is the time to think creatively about how we use time during the school day,” said Matthew Kraft, a professor of economics and education at Brown University.

The plan isn’t being considered in Fort Worth. But district officials are exploring a number of options to help students catch up, including lengthening the school day or extending the school year.

Fort Worth students have lost ground

There’s evidence the academic effects of the pandemic have been widespread in the Fort Worth school district. During a Board of Trustees meeting in December, Sara Arispe, the district’s associate superintendent for accountability and data quality, said the district tested students in the fall of 2020 to get an idea of how much ground they’d lost academically. In math, about 40% of students had improved their achievement levels as compared to the previous fall, despite the effects of the pandemic. But about 55% of students in the district had lost ground in math, she said.

The effects were the worst in fifth, sixth and seventh grades, where more than 60% of students had decreased achievement in math. There wasn’t a substantial difference in outcomes across demographic groups, Arispe said.

About 16% of the students who lost ground in math were close enough to their previous achievement levels that they can likely make up for it either through having an average year or with a bit of extra support, she said. But about three-quarters of those students had fallen so far behind that they’ll need “multiple years with our strongest teachers” to make up what they’ve lost, Arispe said. The district needs to develop a multi-year plan for those students, she said.

The Brown researchers’ plan begins with the premise that all students — even high-achieving students who have fared relatively well during the pandemic — could benefit from individual instruction by a tutor. In the plan, researchers propose school-wide tutoring programs that take place during the school day.

In the plan, researchers propose the creation of a National Tutoring Institute within the U.S. Department of Education. The office would mobilize college students, volunteers and high school students to serve as tutors, with participation in the program being voluntary for school districts. High school students would work with elementary school students as an optional elective, college work-study students would tutor middle school students, and full-time volunteers in programs like Americorps and City Year would work with high school students. Paraprofessionals would work one on one with students with disabilities.

The plan proposes tutors work with groups of no more than four students, with groups meeting four times a week for 30 minutes at a time. Districts would extend the school day by a half hour and schedule tutoring for all students at the same time, either at the beginning or end of the day.

Brown University plan could work at district level

The plan’s authors estimate that tutoring every public school student in the United States would cost about $49.1 billion, making the plan a political longshot. But Kraft, the Brown University professor, said a state or “pioneering” school district could implement scaled-down versions of many of the ideas in the plan.

One of the key features of the plan is the small size of tutoring groups. That’s important, Kraft said, because it allows districts to use college students, community volunteers and older K-12 students as tutors. Full-time teachers learn to manage larger classes through years of training and job experience. Districts can’t easily prepare non-teachers to handle large groups, but with a small amount of training, they can equip volunteers to handle three or four children at once, he said.

By keeping tutoring sessions to a half hour and scheduling them several times a week, schools can help students get the most out of those sessions, Kraft said. Tutoring is a high-engagement form of instruction, he said, and it can be hard for younger students to pay attention for longer than 30 minutes.

Scheduling tutoring sessions during the school day rather than before or after school also offers advantages, Kraft said. When tutoring takes place as a part of the regular school day, attendance improves, he said. It also eliminates the stigma of singling out low-performing students who need extra help, he said.

The kind of intensive, small-group tutoring outlined in the plan would have been beneficial before the pandemic, Kraft said. Wide, persistent achievement gaps between groups of students aren’t a new problem, he said, and there’s ample research that tutoring programs can help close those gaps. But the pandemic has widened many of those gaps, leaving Black, Hispanic and low-income students even further behind their peers. So the need for individualized tutoring is more acute than it’s ever been, he said.

Jerry Moore, the Fort Worth school district’s chief academic officer, said in an email that district officials are considering either extending the school day or extending the school year to help students recover. The district is also focused on improving the quality of instruction and support for students who need extra help, he said.

Those are important priorities for any school district even during a normal year, Moore said, but they will be a major factor in helping students recover academically. If the district extends the school day or school year but doesn’t focus on quality, it only gives students more instruction that isn’t effective enough to help them succeed, he said.

If the district lengthens the school day, it won’t be the first time it has done so. The district adopted an extended school day model when it transformed five of its lowest-performing schools into leadership academies. At those schools, the district kept students on campus after classes ended for tutoring, enrichment activities and extracurricular activities, then sent them home after dinner.

How does state government fit in?

State Sen. Beverly Powell, D-Fort Worth, said funding included in House Bill 3, a school finance overhaul lawmakers passed during the last legislative session, could help districts implement programs to help students recover. The bill includes money for tutoring services to bring struggling students up to grade level and extended instructional time.

Powell, a member of the Senate Education Committee, said she’s optimistic that lawmakers will maintain funding for the programs included in House Bill 3 this year. Shortly before the legislative session began last month, education advocates worried those programs would fall victim to budget cuts. But the state’s budget situation is less dire than some expected, and both the House and Senate budget proposals include a continuation of funding for those programs.

Powell said she was pleased to see Gov. Greg Abbott call for an expansion of broadband internet access across the state. A lack of broadband connectivity is a problem both in rural and urban areas, which hinders students’ ability to do school work at home, she said.

It’s also important that the state gets students back to school in person as quickly as possible, Powell said, but it must be done safely. That means getting teachers vaccinated and ensuring they have a safe work environment, she said.

In an interview last week with the Star-Telegram, Abbott said it’s crucial that the state gets students back in the classroom as quickly as possible. Many students across Texas haven’t fared well in virtual learning, he said, and the state is working to accelerate the process of getting them back to school.

Teachers aren’t included in the current stage of the state’s COVID-19 vaccine protocol. That means teachers aren’t eligible to receive the vaccine unless they qualify under some other provision, like having a health condition that places them at greater risk. State officials haven’t determined whether teachers will be included in the next group to become eligible, Abbott said.

“All I can tell you is this: One element that is needed to return to normalcy as quickly as possible is getting kids back in schools and that will be a primary objective,” he said.

Fort Worth learning loss mirrors national projections

The learning loss trend in Fort Worth is in line with predictions researchers from the nonprofit school assessment organization NWEA released last spring about the nationwide effects of school shutdowns. In math, researchers predicted students in most grades were in danger of losing most or all of the academic gains they’d made the previous year. Researchers predicted the effects would be less severe in reading, where students were expected to retain, on average, about 70% of the progress they made the year before.

In November, NWEA released an updated report suggesting the picture was less dire than researchers had originally predicted. Students across the country lost ground in math, but they started the school year with about the same gains in reading as they would have had in a normal year, according to the report.

Those results came with a major caveat: researchers based their results on comparisons of tests given during 2019 and 2020. But about a quarter of the students who took the test in 2019 dropped out of the testing pool. That group was disproportionately made up of nonwhite students and those from urban districts with high concentrations of poverty — all of whom were expected to be most deeply affected by the pandemic’s academic disruptions.

Furthermore, those figures are based on assessments taken last fall, meaning they don’t account for the effects of this year’s school shutdowns and remote learning.

In a webinar with journalists last fall, NWEA CEO Chris Minnich attributed the results to the dedication of teachers in districts across the country.

“Due to the hard work of teachers, we haven’t seen the loss that we could have,” Minnich said.

Staff writer Eleanor Dearman contributed to this report.