Our students are struggling. As a college president and a clinical psychologist, I know this well.

Recent headlines tell a distressing story about the mental health of college students. While the news articles are alarming, it is worth noting that much of the data they cite comes from self-reporting by students.

This self-reporting gives us important insights into how our students are feeling, but it is not equivalent to clinical diagnoses. By equating self-reporting with diagnoses, we risk applying the wrong interventions.

I’ve spent much of my career overseeing clinical services and other student supports, and I know the importance of clinical interventions. They are intended to be matched to specific diagnoses and can involve a variety of treatments, including individual or group and outpatient or inpatient, by licensed mental health professionals.

But I believe we must shift how we support students’ emotional needs. Clinical interventions are not the only way — and often not the most appropriate or effective way — to support young people who may be temporarily struggling with feelings that do not meet the full psychological definition of mental illness.

Rather than needing a clinical intervention, many students may benefit most from support that builds their resilience if they are feeling sad, worried, overwhelmed or anxious. Resilient students are better positioned to cope with temporary periods of heightened emotional stress.

In the past, teaching these skills was usually not seen as central to the mission of a college or university, yet learning how to cope emotionally may be among our students’ most vital and integral lessons.

It is something that will serve them throughout — and well beyond — their time on our campuses.

Related: Congress is starting to tackle student mental health

Data drawn from student self-reporting provides important insights into their needs. Some 44 percent of students reported that they experienced symptoms of depression during the 2021-22 academic year, a Healthy Minds survey of 96,000 U.S. college students shows; 37 percent said they experienced anxiety.

In addition, two out of five undergraduates said that they “frequently” experience emotional stress, results from a Gallup-Lumina Foundation report found, while 36 percent of students pursuing bachelor’s degrees reported that they had considered “stopping out” in the last six months. The most commonly cited reasons were “emotional stress” (69 percent) and “personal mental health reasons” (59 percent).

Researchers have hypothesized that at least some of these self-reported crises may be due to an increased awareness and normalization of mental health conditions.

This awareness is something we should regard as positive and beneficial because it reduces the stigma and isolation that have long impeded students from getting support. But we also must recognize an unintentional, negative impact of this increased awareness: overinterpretation.

Young people experiencing negative emotions and facing normal developmental challenges may be particularly vulnerable to misidentifying those experiences as actual illnesses.

This is not to suggest that the mental health crisis is not real, or that we should not support our students or validate their experiences. Students are struggling every day on my campus and on campuses across the country. Mental illness often first appears or worsens in young adulthood, and for these students, accessing appropriate clinical intervention is critical.

But for many students, what will be most appropriate and effective are supports to develop their resilience and coping strategies and the confidence to rebound from setbacks.

Being a young adult today is not easy. In addition to facing typical challenges, such as forming an identity and developing life skills, they have grown up with pressures from social media, isolation brought on by the global pandemic and the economic and political uncertainties of the twenty-first century.

Rising college costs have also raised the stakes for many students. College is a huge commitment both monetarily and emotionally, and our students know it.

They inevitably face obstacles when they move into the college environment, such as not knowing where they fit in and encountering more challenging coursework than they had previously. Believing they are an outlier, rather than the norm, may undermine their resilience.

That’s why at Lewis & Clark we incorporate resilience-building practices, using research-based belonging exercises as well as intentional peer-to-peer support.

Two of our psychology professors, Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell and Brian Detweiler-Bedell, spearheaded our participation in a multiyear Stanford-led study that aimed to foster a deeper sense of belonging among our incoming first-year students, with the goal of helping them understand that their struggles are normal — and that things will get better over time.

The exercises in the study incorporated stories of obstacles faced by other students and how they overcame them. While the original study’s sample size was small, we saw an increase in retention rates and GPAs, especially among students from underrepresented groups. The results were so compelling that all incoming Lewis & Clark undergraduates now participate in the social belonging intervention.

Related: OPINION: One college president uses board games, bedtime stories, horses and ice-cream sundaes to help students cope

We also initiated a peer mentoring program specifically serving first-year students. The mentors reach out to incoming first-year students and introduce them to campus life with information about academic advising, navigating health and wellness services and various campus clubs and social options. The mentoring relationship begins during orientation and continues throughout the semester. Just as important as what the peer mentors do is how they model resilience.

Of course, approaches like these should be offered with an understanding of what other interventions some students may need. Clinical depression and anxiety disorders do require clinical support. Higher education institutions must continue to expand our capacity to provide such support for those students who need it.

But we must also prioritize programs that bolster resilience. These efforts can reassure and help students (and their families) who may be misidentifying their feelings based on popular rather than clinical understandings of depression and anxiety.

When it comes to setting students up for success in their professional and personal lives, resilience may be the most important skill we can encourage them to develop.

Robin H. Holmes-Sullivan is president of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has maintained a private clinical psychology and consulting practice for more than three decades.

This story about college students and resilience was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Research points to intensive daily tutoring as one of the most effective ways to help academically struggling children catch up. There have been a hundred randomized control trials, but one of the most cited is of a tutoring program in Chicago high schools, where ninth and 10th graders learned an extra year or two of math from a daily dose of tutoring. That’s the kind of result that could offset pandemic learning losses, which have remained devastating and stubborn nearly four years after Covid first erupted, and it’s why the Biden Administration  has recommended that schools use their $190 billion in federal recovery funds on tutoring.

This tutoring evidence, however, was generated before the pandemic, and I was curious about what post-pandemic research says about how tutoring is going now that almost 40 percent of U.S. public schools say they’re offering high-dosage tutoring and more than one out of 10 students (11 percent) are receiving it this 2023-24 school year. Here are four lessons. 

1. Why timing matters

Scheduling tutoring time during normal school hours and finding classroom space to conduct it are huge challenges for school leaders. The schedule is already packed with other classes and there aren’t enough empty classrooms. The easiest option is to tack tutoring on to the end of the school day as an after-school program.

New Mexico did just that and offered high school students free 45-minute online video sessions three times a week in the evenings and weekends. The tutors were from Saga Education, the same tutoring organization that had produced spectacular results in Chicago. Only about 500 students signed up out of more than 34,000 who were eligible, according to a June 2023 report from MDRC, an outside research organization. Researchers concluded that after-school tutoring wasn’t a “viable solution for making a sizable and lasting impact.” The state has since switched to scheduling tutoring during the school day.

Attendance is spotty too. Many after-school tutoring programs around the country report that even students who sign up don’t attend regularly.

2. A hiring dilemma 

The job of tutor is now the fastest-growing position in the K–12 sector, but 40 percent of schools say they’re struggling to hire tutors. That’s not surprising in a red-hot job market, where many companies say it’s tough to find employees. 

Researchers at MDRC in a December 2023 report wrote about different hiring strategies that schools around the country are using. I was flabbergasted to read that New Mexico was paying online tutors $50 an hour to tutor from their homes. Hourly rates of $20 to $30 are fairly common in my reporting. But at least the state was able to offer tutoring to students in remote, rural areas where it would otherwise be impossible to find qualified tutors.

Tutoring companies are a booming business. Schools are using them because they take away the burden of hiring, training and supervising tutors. However, Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta, found that a tutoring company’s curriculum might have nothing to do with what children are learning in their classrooms and that there’s too little communication between tutors and classroom teachers. Tutors were quitting at high rates and replaced with new ones; students weren’t able to form long-term relationships with their tutors, which researchers say is critical to the success of tutoring. 

When Fulton County schools hired tutors directly, they were more integrated into the school community. However, schools considered them to be “paraprofessionals” and felt there were more urgent duties than tutoring that they needed to do, from substitute teaching and covering lunch duty to assisting teachers. 

Chicago took the burden off schools and hired the tutors from the central office. But schools preferred tutors who were from the neighborhood because they could potentially become future teachers. The MDRC report described a sort of catch-22. Schools don’t have the capacity to hire and train tutors, but the tutors that are sent to them from outside vendors or a central office aren’t ideal either. 

Oakland, Calif., experienced many of the obstacles that schools are facing when trying to deliver tutoring at a large scale to thousands of students. The district attempted to give kindergarten through second grade students a half hour of reading tutoring a day. As described by a December 2023 case study of tutoring by researchers at the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), Oakland struggled with hiring, scheduling and real estate. It hired an outside tutoring organization to help, but it too had trouble recruiting tutors, who complained of low pay. Finding space was difficult. Some tutors had to work in the hallways with children. 

The good news is that students who worked with trained tutors made the same gains in reading as those who were given extra reading help by teachers. But the reading gains for students were inconsistent. Some students progressed less in reading than students typically do in a year without tutoring. Others gained almost an additional year’s worth of reading instruction – 88 percent more.

3. The effectiveness of video tutoring 

Bringing armies of tutors into school buildings is a logistical and security nightmare. Online tutoring solves that problem. Many vendors have been trying to mimic the model of successful high dosage tutoring by scheduling video conferencing sessions many times a week with the same well-trained tutor, who is using a good curriculum with step-by-step methods. But it remains a question whether students are as motivated to work as hard with video tutoring as they are in person. Everyone knows that 30 hours of Zoom instruction during school closures was a disaster. It’s unclear whether small, regular doses of video tutoring can be effective. 

In 2020 and 2021, there were two studies of online video tutoring. A randomized control trial in Italy produced good results, especially when the students received tutoring four times a week. The tutoring was less than half as potent when the sessions fell to twice a week, according to a paper published in September 2023. Another study in Chicago found zero results from video tutoring. But the tutors were unpaid volunteers and many students missed out on sessions. Both tutors and tutees often failed to show up.

The first randomized controlled trial of a virtual tutoring program for reading was conducted during the 2022-23 school year at a large charter school network in Texas. Kindergarten, first and second graders received 20 minutes of video tutoring four times a week, from September through May, with an early reading tutoring organization called OnYourMark. Despite the logistical challenges of setting up little children on computers with headphones, the tutored children ended the year with higher DIBELS scores, a measure of reading proficiency for young children, than students who didn’t receive the tutoring. One-to-one video tutoring sometimes produced double the reading gains as video tutoring in pairs, demonstrating a difference between online and in-person tutoring, where larger groups of two and three students can be very effective too. That study was published in October 2023. 

Video tutoring hasn’t always been a success. A tutoring program by Intervene K-12, a tutoring company, received high marks from reviewers at Johns Hopkins University, but outside evaluators didn’t find benefits when it was tested on students in Texas. In an unpublished study, the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University organization that is promoting and studying tutoring, found no difference in year-end state test scores between students who received the tutoring and those who received other small group support. Study results can depend greatly on whether the comparison control group is getting nothing or another extra-help alternative.

Matthew Kraft, a Brown University economist who studies tutoring, says there hasn’t been an ideal study that pits online video tutoring directly against in-person tutoring to measure the difference between the two. Existing studies, he said, show some “encouraging signs.” 

The most important thing for researchers to sort out is how many students a tutor can work with online at once. It’s unclear if groups of three or four, which can be effective in person, are as effective online. “The comments we’re getting from tutors are that it’s significantly different to tutor three students online than it is to tutor three students in person,” Kraft said.

In my observations of video tutoring, I have seen several students in groups of three angle their computers away from their faces. I’ve watched tutors call students’ names over and over again, trying to get their attention. To me, students appear far more focused and energetic in one-to-one video tutoring.

4. How humans and machines could take turns

A major downside to every kind of tutoring, both in-person and online, is its cost. The tutoring that worked so well in Chicago can run $4,000 per student. It’s expensive because students are getting over a hundred hours of tutoring and schools need to pay the tutors’ hourly wages. Several researchers are studying how to lower the costs of tutoring by combining human tutoring with online practice work. 

In one pre-pandemic study that was described in a March 2023 research brief by the University of Chicago’s Education Lab, students worked in groups of four with an in-person tutor. The tutors worked closely with two students at a time while the other two students worked on practice problems independently on ALEKS, a widely used computerized tutoring system developed by academic researchers and owned by McGraw-Hill. Each day the students switched:  the ALEKS kids worked with the tutor and the tutored kids turned to ALEKS. The tutor sat with all four students together, monitoring the ALEKS kids to make sure they were doing their math on the computer.

The math gains nearly matched what the researchers had found in a prior study of human tutoring alone, where tutors worked with only two students at a time and required twice as many tutors. The cost was $2,000 per student, much less than the usual $3,000-$4,000 per student price tag of the human tutoring program.

Researchers at the University of Chicago have been testing the same model with online video tutoring, instead of in-person, and said they are seeing “encouraging initial indications.” Currently, the research team is studying how many students one tutor can handle at a time, from four to as many as eight students, alternating between humans and ed tech, in order to find out if the sessions are still effective.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University conducted a similar study of swapping between human tutoring and practicing math on computers. Instead of ALEKS, this pilot study used Mathia, another computerized tutoring system developed by academic researchers and owned by Carnegie Learning. This was not a randomized control trial, but it did take place during the pandemic in 2020-21. Middle school students doubled the amount of math they learned compared to similar students who didn’t receive the tutoring, according to Ken Koedinger, a Carnegie Mellon professor who was part of the research team. 

“AI tutors work when students use them,” said Koedinger. “But if students aren’t using them, they obviously don’t work.” The human tutors are better at motivating the students to keep practicing, he said. The computer system gives each student personalized practice work, targeted to their needs, instant feedback and hints.

Technology can also guide the tutors. With one early reading program, called Chapter One, in-person tutors work with young elementary school children in the classroom. Chapter One’s website keeps track of every child’s progress. The tutor’s screen indicates which student to work with next and what skills that student needs to work on.  It also suggests phonics lessons and activities that the tutor can use during the session.  A two-year randomized control trial, published in December 2023, found that the tutored children – many of whom received short five-minute bursts of tutoring at a time – outperformed children who didn’t receive the tutoring. 

The next frontier in tutoring, of course, is generative AI, such as Chat GPT. Researchers are studying how students learn directly from Khan Academy’s Khanmigo, which gives step-by-step, personalized guidance, like a tutor, on how to solve problems. Other researchers are using this technology to help coach human tutors so that they can better respond to students’ misunderstandings and confusion. I’ll be looking out for these studies and will share the results with you.

This story about video tutoring was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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CONCORD, Calif. – Aylah Levy had some catching up to do this fall when she started first grade.

After spending her kindergarten year at an alternative program that met exclusively outdoors, Aylah, 6, had to adjust to being inside a classroom. She knew only a handful of numbers and was not printing her letters clearly. To help her along, the teacher at her Bay Area elementary school has been showing her the right way to hold a pencil.

“It’s harder. Way, way harder,” Aylah said of the new grip.

Still, her mother, Hannah Levy, says it was the right decision to skip kindergarten. She wanted Aylah to enjoy being a kid. There is plenty of time, she reasoned, for her daughter to develop study skills.

The number of kindergartners in public school plunged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerned about the virus or wanting to avoid online school, hundreds of thousands of families delayed the start of school for their young children. Most have returned to schooling of some kind, but even three years after the pandemic school closures, kindergarten enrollment has continued to lag.

Some parents like Levy don’t see much value in traditional kindergarten. For others, it’s a matter of keeping children in other child care arrangements that better fit their lifestyles. And for many, kindergarten simply is no longer the assumed first step in a child’s formal education, another sign of the way the pandemic and online learning upended the U.S. school system. 

Kindergarten enrollment remained down 5.2 percent in the 2022-2023 school year compared with the 2019-2020 school year, according to an Associated Press analysis of state-level data. Public school enrollment across all grades fell 2.2 percent. 

Kindergarten is considered a crucial year for children to learn to follow directions, regulate behavior and get accustomed to learning. Missing that year of school can put kids at a disadvantage, especially those from low-income families and families whose first language is not English, said Deborah Stipek, a former dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Those children are sometimes behind in recognizing letters and counting to 10 even before starting school, she said.

But to some parents, that foundation seems less urgent post-pandemic. For many, kindergarten just doesn’t seem to work for their lives.

Related: We know how to help young kids cope with the trauma of the last year – but will we do it?

Students who disengaged during the pandemic school closures have been making their way back to schools. But kindergarten enrollment remained down 5.2 percent in the 2022-2023 school year compared with the 2019-2020 school year, according to an Associated Press analysis of state-level data. Public school enrollment across all grades fell 2.2 percent. 

Kindergarten means a seismic change in some families’ lifestyles. After years of all-day child care, they suddenly must manage afternoon pickups with limited and expensive options for after-school care. Some worry their child isn’t ready for the structure and behavioral expectations of a public school classroom. And many think whatever their child misses at school can be quickly learned in first grade. 

Christina Engram was set to send her daughter Nevaeh to kindergarten this fall at her neighborhood school in Oakland, until she learned her daughter would not have a spot in the after-school program there. That meant she would need to be picked up at 2:30 most afternoons.

“If I put her in public school, I would have to cut my hours, and I basically wouldn’t have a good income for me and my kids,” said Engram, a preschool teacher and a mother of two. 

Engram decided to keep Nevaeh in a child care center for another year. Engram receives a state child care subsidy that helps her pay for full-time child care or preschool until her child is 6 and must enroll in first grade.

“If I put her in public school, I would have to cut my hours, and I basically wouldn’t have a good income for me and my kids.”

Christina Engram, a preschool teacher and a mother of two

Compared with kindergarten, she believed her daughter would be more likely to receive extra attention at the child care center, which has more adult staff per child. 

“She knows her numbers. She knows her ABC’s. She knows how to spell her name,” Engram said. “But when she feels frustrated that she can’t do something, her frustration overtakes her. She needs extra attention and care. She has some shyness about her when she thinks she’s going to give the wrong answer.”

Related: Luring Covid-cautious parents back to school

In California, where kindergarten is not mandatory, enrollment for that grade fell 10.1 percent from the 2019-20 to 2021-22 school year. Enrollment seemed to rebound in the next school year, growing by over 5 percent in fall 2022, but that may have been inflated by the state’s expansion of transitional kindergarten — a grade before kindergarten that is available to older 4-year-olds. The state Department of Education has not disclosed how many children last school year were regular kindergartners as opposed to transitional students. 

Many would-be kindergartners are among the tens of thousands of families that have turned to homeschooling.

Some parents say they came to homeschooling almost accidentally. Convinced their family wasn’t ready for “school,” they kept their 5-year-old home, then found they needed more structure. They purchased some activities or a curriculum — and homeschooling stuck.

Others chose homeschooling for kindergartners after watching older children in traditional school. Jenny Almazan is homeschooling Ezra, 6, after pulling his sister Emma, 9, from a school in Chino, California. 

“She would rush home from school, eat dinner, do an hour or two of schoolwork, shower and go to bed. She wasn’t given time to be a kid,” Almazan said. Almazan also worried about school shootings and pressures her kids might face at school to act or dress a certain way.

To make it all work, Almazan quit her job as a preschool teacher. Most days, the children’s learning happens outside of the home, when they are playing at the park, visiting museums or even doing math while grocery shopping.

“She would rush home from school, eat dinner, do an hour or two of schoolwork, shower and go to bed. She wasn’t given time to be a kid.”

Jenny Almazan, who is homeschooling Ezra, 6, after pulling his sister Emma, 9, from a school in Chino, California

“My kids are not missing anything by not being in public school,” she said. “Every child has different needs. I’m not saying public school is bad. It’s not. But for us, this fits.”

Kindergarten is important for all children, but especially those who do not attend preschool or who haven’t had much exposure to math, reading and other subjects, said Steve Barnett, co-director for the National Institute for Early Education Research and a professor at Rutgers University.

“The question actually is: If you didn’t go to kindergarten, what did you do instead?” he said.

Related: Millions of kids are missing weeks of school as attendance tanks across the US

Hannah Levy chose the Berkeley Forest School to start her daughter’s education, in part because she valued how teachers infused subjects like science with lessons on nature. She pictured traditional kindergarten as a place where children sit inside at desks, do worksheets and have few play-based experiences.

“I learned about nature. We learned in a different way,” daughter Aylah said.

But the appeal of a suburban school system had brought the family from San Francisco, and when it came time for first grade, Aylah enrolled at Cornell Elementary in Albany.

Early this fall, Levy recalled Aylah coming home with a project where every first grader had a page in a book to write about who they were. Some pages had only scribbles and others had legible print. She said Aylah fell somewhere in the middle.

“It was interesting to me because it was the moment I thought, ‘What would it be like if she was in kindergarten?’” she said.

In a conference with Levy, Aylah’s teacher said she was working with the girl on her writing, but there were no other concerns. “She said anything Aylah was behind on, she has caught up to the point that she would never differentiate that Aylah didn’t go to Cornell for kindergarten as well,” Levy said.

Levy said she feels good about Aylah’s attitude toward school, though she misses knowing she was outside interacting with nature.

So does Aylah.

“I miss my friends and being outside,” she said. “I also miss my favorite teacher.”

Lurye reported from New Orleans and Stavely reported from Oakland. Daniel J. Willis of EdSource contributed from Concord.

This article was produced by The Associated Press and. EdSource is a nonprofit newsroom based in California that covers equity in education with in-depth analysis and data-driven journalism.

The Associated Press receives support from the Overdeck Family Foundation for reporting focused on early learning. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Numbers don’t lie, right? But they also don’t always tell the whole story. That’s the case with the most recent results from a key global education test, the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA. 

In the past, PISA results have often spurred anguished discussion about why U.S. students are so far behind other countries like Finland, Korea and Poland. But the most recent rankings, released in December 2023, indicated that U.S. 15-year olds moved up in the international rankings for all three subjects –  math, reading and science. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona credited the largest federal investment in education in history – roughly $200 billion – for keeping the United States “in the game” during the pandemic. (The tests were administered in 2022.)

But that rosy spin hides a much grimmer picture. Rankings may have risen, but test scores did not. The only reason the U.S. rose is because academic performance in once higher ranking countries, such as Iceland and the Slovak Republic, fell by even more since the previous testing round in 2018. Neither India nor China, which topped the rankings in 2018, participated in the 2022 PISA. In math, the U.S. rose from 29th place to 28th place, still in the bottom half of economically advanced nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international organization of 38 member countries that oversees the PISA exam.

The deterioration in math was particularly devastating. American students scored 13 points lower than in 2018, equivalent to losing two-thirds of a year of education in the subject. These were the lowest U.S. math scores recorded in the history of the PISA math test, which began in 2003. More than a third of U.S. 15-year-olds (mostly 10th graders) are considered to be low performers, unable to compare distances between two routes or convert prices into a different currency. Over the past decade, the share of U.S. students in this lowest level has swelled; back in 2012, a little over a quarter of U.S. students were considered to be low performers.

Only seven percent of American students can do math at advanced levels. The United States has more students in the bottom group and fewer students in the top group than most other industrialized countries that are part of the OECD. (Click here to see an international ranking of low and top performers in each country.)

The results also confirmed the widespread inequalities in U.S. education. Black and Hispanic students, on average, scored far below Asian and white students. Those from low-income backgrounds scored lower than their more affluent peers.

Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, emphasized that the inequities in the U.S. are often misunderstood to be primarily problem of weak schools in poor neighborhoods. His analysis indicates that low math performance is common throughout U.S. schools. Some students are performing much worse than others within the same school, and that range between low and advanced students within U.S. schools is much greater than the range in scores between schools. 

This new PISA test is the first major international education indicator since the Covid pandemic closed schools and disrupted education. Test scores declined all around the world, but the OECD found there was only a small relationship between how long schools were closed and their students’ performance on the PISA test. School closures explained only 11 percent of the variation in countries’ test scores; nearly 90 percent is attributable to other, unclear reasons. However, the OECD looked at the absolute level of test scores and not how much test scores fell or rose. More analysis is needed to see if there’s a stronger link between school closures and test score changes. 

Even if school closures eventually prove to be a more important factor, the pandemic isn’t the only reason students are struggling. Global scores have generally been declining for the past two decades. One hypothesis is that technology is distracting teenagers. Students were asked about technology distraction for the first time on the 2022 PISA. Forty-five percent of students said they feel anxious if their phones are not near them. Sixty-five percent report being distracted by digital devices during math lessons. Up to an hour a day of computer time for leisure was associated with higher performance. But heavy users, those who spent five to seven hours on computers for fun, had lower academic performance, even after adjusting for family and school socioeconomic profiles. 

Another factor could be the rise in migration across the world. Perhaps declining test scores reflect the challenge of educating new immigrants. However, the OECD didn’t find a statistically significant correlation between immigration and academic performance on average. In the United States, immigrants outscored students with native-born parents in math after adjusting for socio-economic status. There was no difference between immigrants and non-immigrants in reading.

Japan was one of the few countries to defy the trends. Both its math and reading scores rose considerably between 2018 and 2022. Akihiko Takahashi, professor emeritus of mathematics and mathematics education at Chicago’s DePaul University, said schools were closed for a shorter period of time in Japan and that helped, but he also credits the collective spirit among Japanese teachers. In his conversations with Japanese teachers, Takahashi learned how teachers covered for each other during school closures to make sure no students in their schools fell behind. Some went house to house, correcting student homework.  

It’s tempting to look at the terrible PISA math scores and say they are evidence that the U.S. needs to change how it teaches math. But the PISA results don’t offer clear recommendations on which math approaches are most effective. Even Japan, one of the top performing nations, has a mixed approach. Takahashi says that students are taught with a more progressive approach in elementary school, often asking students to solve problems on their own without step-by-step instructions and to develop their own mathematical reasoning. But by high school, when this PISA exam is taken, direct, explicit instruction is more the norm.

The new results also highlighted the continued decline of a former star. For years, Finland was a role model for excellent academic performance. Education officials visited from around the world to learn about its progressive approaches. But the country has dropped 60 points over the past few testing cycles – equivalent to losing three full school years of education. I suspect we won’t be hearing calls to teach the Finnish way anymore. “You have to be careful because the leaders of today can be the laggards of tomorrow,” said Tom Loveless, an independent researcher who studies international assessments.

There was one bright spot for American students. Fifteen-year-olds scored comparatively well on the PISA reading test, with their scores dropping by just one point while other countries experienced much steeper declines. But that good news is also tempered by the most recent scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) test, often called the Nation’s Report Card. Reading scores of fourth and eighth graders deteriorated over the last two testing cycles in 2019 and 2022.

Overall, the PISA results provide additional confirmation that U.S. students are in trouble, especially in math, and we can’t put all the blame on the pandemic.

This story about the 2022 PISA results was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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In the heart of the Deep South, Mississippi has wrestled with enduring educational disparities, a profoundly rooted challenge passed down through generations.

The pandemic exacerbated preexisting funding inequities for high-need, under-resourced school districts, a longstanding challenge for the Magnolia State. Evidence of this persistent struggle is the distressing fact that 32 school districts remain under federal desegregation orders.

To delve deeper into how chronically under-resourced schools fared during the pandemic, the Mississippi Center for Justice (MCJ) spent over a year conducting parent focus groups and examining educational testing data in 12 predominantly Black and economically disadvantaged communities in the rural Delta, the northwestern section of the state, one of the poorest regions in the U.S.

Sadly, what we discovered was not surprising. Mississippi’s past, marked by a legacy of racial segregation and educational inequality, continues to cast a long shadow on its present and future.

Our extensive work at MCJ culminated in a report that showcased an unsettling reality: Affordability and availability are formidable barriers to internet access, while reading and math proficiency rates are significantly below the state averages in grades 3-8. In addition, special education programs and staff remain woefully under-resourced, while access to mental health professionals and support is often limited or, in some cases, entirely nonexistent. Past excuses by the state to avoid addressing these disparities are no longer acceptable.

It is past time for lawmakers to make education in Mississippi a priority for all students.

These issues, among others, further widen the chasm between the haves and have-nots in Mississippi and are creating a new generation of students failed by the system. The evidence of this gap is glaring according to the School Finance Indicators Database.

Spending in Mississippi’s highest-poverty districts is 55 percent below the estimated “adequate” level and 18 percent below adequate in the state’s wealthiest districts, according to the Database.

A significant challenge for Delta communities is the ever-growing digital divide. During the pandemic, students in better-resourced school districts had greater access to high-speed internet connections for a relatively seamless transition to remote learning, while students throughout the Delta struggled with internet accessibility, which contributed to significant learning loss.

While most students across the state received devices for virtual learning, many couldn’t use them due to poor, limited or no internet access. Our report found that this left them at a severe disadvantage.

Related: Homework in a McDonald’s parking lot: Inside one mother’s fight to help her kids get an education during coronavirus

Mississippi has one of the largest populations of K-12 students who lack broadband access; its sparsely populated rural communities are often redlined by internet service providers, leaving them grossly unserved or underserved. But it’s not just a Mississippi trend. According to a national study of the Black Rural South, nearly three-quarters, or 72.6 percent, of households in the Black Rural South do not have broadband of at least 25 Mbps — the minimum standard for broadband internet.

Compounding these challenges is the stark lack of access to mental health care, a formidable barrier for Mississippi students. According to our report, while parents described the immense toll the pandemic had on their family’s mental health, few of them sought help or had access to mental health professionals. Over 70 percent of children in Mississippi with major depression disorder do not receive treatment, surpassing the national average of 60 percent.

Unfortunately, the pandemic exacerbated this issue, with many students grappling with losing loved ones, economic instability and the social isolation imposed by remote learning. The student-to-counselor ratio in Mississippi is 398 to 1, almost 60 percent higher than the American School Counselor Association recommendation of 250 to 1, according to an analysis done by Charlie Health.

Our report also found that students with disabilities were acutely affected during the pandemic. Although Covid guidelines mandated compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, many districts consistently failed to support students and their parents.

Mississippi now confronts a moral imperative to fortify its historically underserved school districts, especially those most severely impacted by the pandemic. With a $3.9 billion surplus of state revenue in 2023, legislators finally have the means to fully fund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP) for the first time since 2008. Yet they have chosen not to do so during a time when schools need investment and support the most.

Related: OPINION: Lessons from Mississippi: Is there really a miracle here we can all learn from?

It is past time for lawmakers to make education in Mississippi a priority for all students, especially those in historically under-resourced districts. The state must begin investing in education to overcome historical inequities and post-pandemic challenges. This is the only viable path toward dismantling the systemic barriers that have perpetuated disparities for far too long.

Until then, Mississippi’s commitment to the well-being and success of all its residents, regardless of their ZIP code, will remain in question.

The time for unwavering action is now.

Kim L. Wiley is a former educator who serves as the Education Analyst & Project Coordinator for the Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm committed to advancing racial and economic justice.

This story about Mississippi education inequality was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: Historically underserved school districts in Mississippi were hit hard in the pandemic and need immediate help   appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Ever since schools reopened and resumed in-person instruction, districts have been trying to help students catch up from pandemic learning losses. The Biden Administration has urged schools to use tutoring. Many schools have purchased an online version that gives students 24/7 access to tutors. Typically, communication is through text chat, similar to communicating with customer service on a website. Students never see their tutors or hear their voices. 

Researchers estimate that billions have been spent on these online tutoring services, but so far, there’s no good evidence that they are helping many students catch up. And many students need extra help. According to the most recent test scores from spring 2023, 50 percent more students are below grade level than before the pandemic; even higher achieving students remain months behind where they should be.

Low uptake

The main problem is that on-demand tutoring relies on students to seek extra help. Very few do. Some school systems have reported usage rates below 2 percent. A 2022 study by researchers at Brown University of an effort to boost usage among 7,000 students at a California charter school network found that students who needed the most help were the least likely to try online tutoring and only a very small percentage of students used it regularly. Opt-in tutoring could “exacerbate inequalities rather than reduce them,” warned a  September 2023 research brief by Brown University’s Annenberg Center, Results for America, a nonprofit that promotes evidence-backed policies, the American Institutes for Research and NWEA, an assessment firm.

In January 2023, an independent research firm Mathematica released a more positive report on students’ math gains with an online tutoring service called UPchieve, which uses volunteers as tutors. It seemed to suggest that high school students could make extraordinary math progress from online homework help. 

UPchieve is a foundation-funded nonprofit with a slightly different model. Instead of schools buying the tutoring service from a commercial vendor, UPchieve makes its tutors freely available to any student in grades eight to 12 living in a low-income zip code or attending a low-income high school. Behind the scenes, foundations cover the cost to deliver the tutoring, about $5 per student served. (Those foundations include the Bill & Melinda Gates and the Overdeck Family foundations, which are also among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

UPchieve posted findings from the study in large font on its website: “Using UPchieve 9 times caused student test scores to meaningfully increase” by “9 percentile rank points.” If true, that would be equivalent to doubling the amount of math that a typical high school student learns. That would mean that students learned an extra 14 weeks worth of math from just a few extra hours of instruction. Not even the most highly regarded and expensive tutoring programs using professional tutors who are following clear lesson plans achieve this.

The study garnered a lot of attention on social media and flattering media coverage “for disrupting learning loss in low-income kids.” But how real was this progress? 

Gift card incentives

After I read the study, which was also commissioned by the Gates foundation, I immediately saw that UPchieve’s excerpts were taken out of context. This was not a straightforward randomized controlled trial, comparing what happens to students who were offered this tutoring with students who were not. Instead, it was a trial of the power of cash incentives and email reminders. 

For the experiment, Mathematica researchers had recruited high schoolers who were already logging into the UPchieve tutoring service. These were no ordinary ninth and 10th graders. They were motivated to seek extra help, resourceful enough to find this tutoring website on their own (it was not promoted through their schools) and liked math enough to take extra tests to participate in the study. One group was given extra payments of $5 a week for doing at least 10 minutes of math tutoring on UPchieve, and sent weekly email reminders. The other group wasn’t. Students in both groups received $100 for participating in the study.

The gift cards increased usage by 1.6 hours or five to six more sessions over the course of 14 weeks. These incentivized students “met” with a tutor for a total of nine sessions on average; the other students averaged fewer than four sessions. (As an aside, it’s unusual that cash incentives would double usage. Slicing the results another way, only 22 percent of the students in the gift-card group used UPchieve more than 10 times compared with 14 percent in the other group. That’s more typical.) 

At the end of 14 weeks, students took the Renaissance Star math test, an assessment taken by millions of students across the nation. But the researchers did not report those test scores. That’s because they were unlucky in their random assignment of students. By chance, comparatively weaker math students kept getting assigned to receive cash incentives. It wasn’t an apples-to-apples comparison between the two groups, a problem that can happen in a small randomized controlled trial. To compensate, the researchers statistically adjusted the final math scores to account for differences in baseline math achievement. It’s those statistically adjusted scores that showed such huge math gains for the students who had received the cash incentives and used the tutoring service more.

However, the huge 9 percentile point improvement in math was not statistically significant. There were so few students in the study – 89 in total – that the results could have been a fluke. You’d need a much larger sample size to be confident.

A caution from the researcher 

When I interviewed one of the Mathematica researchers, he was cautious about UPchieve and on-demand tutoring in general.  “This is an approach to tutoring that has promise for improving students’ math knowledge for a specific subset of students:  those who are likely to proactively take up an on-demand tutoring service,” said Greg Chojnacki, a co-author of the UPchieve study. “The study really doesn’t speak to how promising this model is for students who may face additional barriers to taking up tutoring.”

Chojnacki has been studying different versions of tutoring and he says that this on-demand version might prove to be beneficial for the “kid who may be jumping up for extra help the first chance they get,” while other children might first need to “build a trusting relationship” with a tutor they can see and talk to before they engage in learning. With UPchieve and other on-demand models, students are assigned to a different tutor at each session and don’t get a chance to build a relationship. 

Chojnacki also walked back the numerical results in our interview. He told me not to “put too much stock” in the exact amount of math that students learned. He said he’s confident that self-motivated students who use the tutoring service more often learned more math, but it could be “anywhere above zero” and not nearly as high as 9 percentile points – an extra three and a half months worth of math instruction.

UPchieve defends “magical” results

UPchieve’s founder, Aly Murray, told me that the Mathematica study results initially surprised her, too. “I agree they almost seem magical,” she said by email. While acknowledging that a larger study is needed to confirm the results, she said she believes that online tutoring without audio and video can “lead to greater learning” than in-person tutoring “when done right.”

“I personally believe that tutoring is most effective when the student is choosing to be there and has an acute need that they want to address (two things that are both uniquely true of on-demand tutoring),” she wrote. “Students have told us how helpful it is to get timely feedback and support in the exact moment that they get confused (which is often late at night in their homes while working on their homework). So in general, I believe that on-demand tutoring is more impactful than traditional high-dosage tutoring models on a per tutoring session or per hour of tutoring basis. This could be part of why we were able to achieve such outsized results despite the low number of sessions.”

Murray acknowledged that low usage remains a problem. At UPchieve’s partner schools, only 5 percent of students logged in at least once during the 2022-23 year, she told me. At some schools, usage rates fell below 1 percent. Her goal is to increase usage rates at partner schools to 36 percent. (Any low-income student in grades eight to 12 can use the tutoring service at no cost and their schools don’t pay UPchieve for the tutoring either, but some “partner” schools pay UPchieve to promote and monitor usage.) 

The downside to homework help

Helping students who are stuck on a homework assignment is certainly nice for motivated kids who love school, but relying on homework questions is a poor way to catch up students who are the most behind, according to many tutoring experts. 

“I have a hard time believing that students know enough about what they don’t know,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University economist who founded the National Student Support Accelerator, which aims to bring evidence-based tutoring to more students. 

For students who are behind grade level, homework questions often don’t address their gaps in basic math foundations. “Maybe underneath, they’re struggling with percentages, but they’re bringing an algebra question,” said Loeb. “If you just bring the work of the classroom to the tutor, it doesn’t help students very much.” 

Pre-pandemic research of once-a-week after-school homework help also produced disappointing results for struggling students. Effective tutoring starts with an assessment of students’ gaps, Loeb said, followed by consistent, structured lessons.

Schools struggle to offer tutors for all students

With so little evidence, why are schools buying on-demand online tutoring? Pittsburgh superintendent Wayne Walters said he was unable to arrange for in-person tutoring in all of his 54 schools and wanted to give each of his 19,000 students access to something. He signed a contract with Tutor.com for unlimited online text-chat tutoring in 2023-24. 

“I’m going forward with it because it’s available,” Walters said. “If I don’t have something to provide, or even offer, then that limits opportunity and access. If there’s no access, then I can’t even push the needle to address the most marginalized and the most vulnerable.”

Walters hopes to make on-demand tutoring “sexy” and appealing to high schoolers accustomed to texting. But online tutoring is not the same as spontaneous texting between friends. One-minute delays in tutors’ replies to questions can test students’ patience. 

On-demand tutoring can appear to be an economical option. Pittsburgh is able to offer this kind of tutoring, which includes college admissions test prep for high schoolers, to all 19,000 of its students for $600,000. Providing 400 students with a high-dosage tutoring program – the kind that researchers recommend – could cost $1.5 million. There are thousands of Pittsburgh students who are significantly behind grade level. It doesn’t seem fair to deliver high-quality in-person tutoring to only a lucky few.  

However, once you factor in actual usage, the economics of on-demand tutoring looks less impressive. In Fairfax County, Va., for example, only 1.6 percent of students used Tutor.com. If Pittsburgh doesn’t surpass that rate, then no more than 300 of its students will be served.

There are no villains here. School leaders are trying to do the best they can and be fair to everyone. Hopes are raised when research suggests that online on-demand tutoring can work if they can succeed in marketing to students. But they should be skeptical of studies that promise easy solutions before investing precious resources. That money could be better spent on small-group tutoring that dozens of studies show is more effective for students.

This story about drop-in tutoring was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post PROOF POINTS: Schools keep buying online drop-in tutoring. The research doesn’t support it appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Millions of working parents will face a child care emergency after pandemic-era federal funding ends Sept. 30, just two days from now. 

Whether you are one of the affected parents or not, you will feel the impact on our nation’s workforce and economy. 

According to estimates, up to 70,000 daycare facilities could close, causing three million child care slots to vanish. This is a loss of educational opportunity for children, but also a devastating loss of support for millions of working parents who may have to leave their jobs. 

All of us will surely feel the resulting blow to our economy if a projected $9 billion-plus in earnings is lost.

Related: What American can learn from Canada’s new $10 a day childcare

Sadly, this is just the latest failure in a child care system that has been broken for decades. 

As The Casey Foundation recently highlighted in our 2023 KIDS COUNT^® Data Book, shortcomings of the child care system already cost the country $122 billion a year in lost wages, tax revenue and productivity. 

We cannot allow these cascading consequences to continue.

Every other country with an economy comparable to ours has created a sustainable system that better meets the needs of families, employers and child care workers.

It’s time for policymakers to explore immediate solutions. We know they exist: Every other country with an economy comparable to ours has created a sustainable system that better meets the needs of families, employers and child care workers. 

Moreover, we already have evidence in our own economy of what can work. For example, home-based providers are more likely to operate during non-traditional hours, when shift workers, single parents and student parents need them. One thing we can do right away is to increase access to affordable startup and expansion capital for new and existing home-based centers. 

A robust, reliable care system requires investment. Average public spending on child care among the comparatively wealthy Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations is $16,000 a year per child. 

The United States invests a mere $500 per child. How can we invest so little in our future workforce? In the leaders of tomorrow? 

Related: A wave of childcare closures is coming as funding dries up

Families are working hard to meet their needs but costs continue to rise, putting quality care beyond their reach. Child care costs in the U.S. averaged $10,600 a year in 2021, according to an analysis by the advocacy organization Child Care Aware. That’s 10 percent of a couple’s average income — or 35 percent of a single parent’s income. 

In at least 34 states, care for the youngest children is more expensive than in-state college tuition. 

What support does exist for families is difficult to get and insufficient. As a result, only one out of every six U.S. children eligible for public subsidies receives them. 

Women, single parents, parents in poverty, families of color and immigrant families carry the heaviest burden of this crisis: An analysis of 2017 data indicated center-based care for two children absorbed 26 percent of a white working mother’s median household income. For Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Black working mothers, those figures were 42 percent, 51 percent and 56 percent, respectively. 

These figures demonstrate how the cost of care can make it almost impossible for a household to meet other basic needs like housing, food and transportation — which all continue to escalate in cost.

In spite of this, providers themselves, almost all women and disproportionately women of color, are barely staying afloat, operating on one percent margins. 

No wonder so many are expected to close their doors starting next month.

In August, more than 1,500 state lawmakers from across the country gathered in Indianapolis for the annual National Conference of State Legislatures summit. 

We heard Republicans and Democrats agree that something must be done to address the child care crisis. 

They know the fallout will keep us from moving forward, from filling jobs and from ensuring that children are safe and thriving while their parents are working or completing their own education. 

It’s time to channel that consensus into urgent action and real solutions.  

This is a time for creativity and thinking big among both the private and public sector. The Casey Foundation urges lawmakers to invest in the child care sector, starting with these steps:

• Congress should reauthorize and strengthen the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act. The main reason we didn’t lose 75,000 child care centers and 3 million slots during the pandemic was the $40 billion allocated to strengthen the child care sector in the American Rescue Plan Act. We now have evidence that these investments work.

• Public and private leaders should work together specifically to improve infrastructure for home-based child care providers. Start by increasing access to affordable startup and expansion capital. 

• Governors and legislators should encourage the higher education and business communities to take steps such as co-locating child care at work and learning sites to reduce transportation challenges. 

The underpinnings of our families and our economy are too important for our elected officials to continue to ignore what is happening. The pandemic sharpened our understanding of the issues. There are good models to follow. 

Now is the moment for generational action to ensure children, parents and guardians, providers and employers are never again standing at the edge of a cliff, looking for a bridge to safety, and wondering whose kids will make it to the other side and whose will be left behind.

Lisa M. Hamilton is president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. 

This story about the child care funding cliff was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post OPINION: Our economy is about to meet the child care cliff — and it will be devastating  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

While the rest of the country’s schools were losing ground in math during the COVID pandemic, students in a small rural Alabama school district soared. 

Piedmont City schools landed in the top spot among all school districts nationwide in a comparison of math scores in 2019 and 2022.

Other Alabama school districts fared well, too, but Piedmont, a small, 1,100-student district where 7 out of 10 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, stood out. Nationwide, students are on average half a year behind in math, researchers say.

Schools nationwide are scrambling to find ways to recover unfinished learning over the past three years, using federal relief money to hire interventionists to work with students and placing students in high-dose tutoring sessions after school and during the summer. 

Piedmont has pursued an approach it began before the pandemic: It focused on changing its regular school day and working with its current staff. 

Superintendent Mike Hayes said two keys for success have been giving teachers more regular time to dig into student data and increasing instructional time where math teachers can focus on specific skills.

“We made a total transformation about five years ago,” he said, “where we decided that we were going to let data make every decision as far as instructional changes were concerned. And that we were going to involve the teachers, and that it was going to be a collaborative effort and we were going to drill down as minutely as we could.”

Rebecca Dreyfus, with TNTP, a national nonprofit devoted to helping schools improve student learning, helps teachers apply best practices from research to the classroom.

Dreyfus said targeted instruction for small groups of students has years of research and evidence to back it up as an effective way for teachers to teach and students to learn. Pinpointing what skills need shoring up – and using systematic and explicit instruction, as backed up by the “science of math” – makes it even more effective.

“The short answer is that using data effectively and efficiently to plan and monitor instruction is always going to make instruction better for kids,” Dreyfus said.

Related: The science of reading swept reforms into classrooms. What about math?

Because math is a subject that builds on itself year after year, teachers need to make sure students, even those who are struggling, are keeping up with grade level learning. 

“You’re not just pulling kids to teach them a skill that they should have had a few years ago that is not coming back,” she said. “We’re trying to teach them something that will ensure they have access to the grade-level rigor.”

“I think the data days give us an opportunity to really dig in to where the weaknesses are and adjust instruction.”

Cassie Holbrooks, who teaches fourth grade math in Piedmont City schools

A look at math scores for spring 2022 shows the district ranked twelfth in the state on math proficiency, with 57 percent of students reaching proficiency. Statewide, 30 percent of students scored proficient in math.

That’s a lot of progress over the last five years; in 2017, when Hayes took over as superintendent, Piedmont students ranked 35th in math proficiency.

“Once we made that decision and stuck to it and made changes and allowed our teachers time to look at the data and dive into the data, it paid off,” Hayes said.

Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety

Hayes said his team knew that if they wanted teachers to use student data well they needed to give teachers more time to dig in and analyze the numbers. 

So they made the school day longer and freed up enough full days to allow for “data days,” Hayes said.

Every four weeks, teachers get together to examine student data. 

“I think the data days give us an opportunity to really dig in to where the weaknesses are and adjust instruction,” said Cassie Holbrooks, who teaches fourth grade math. “We’re able to take those small groups and adjust all our instruction based on the data that we look at.”

Sixth grade teacher Lisa Hayes, who has taught for 35 years, said when she joined the district five years ago she was surprised to see how hard teachers worked during those data days.

“When I came here and we had a workday,” she said, “you don’t sit in your room. You’re in here [the media center] most of the day, digging through test scores.”

Understanding student data is the main ingredient when it comes to knowing what to do next.

Related: How can schools dig out from a generation worth of lost math progress?

After thoroughly examining student data, in addition to making plans for classroom lessons, teachers decide how to use targeted small group instruction – where a teacher works directly with a small number of students to target particular skills.

Grouping two to six students together to work on an identified, specific skill has been used for reading instruction and in younger grades for a long time. 

There is less research on the use of targeted small group instruction in math and in middle grades – but researchers like Dreyfus say that the same principles of correctly identifying students that need extra help on certain skills, rather than simply pulling out children who are “behind,” applies.

“We’ve always done small groups in reading,” third-grade teacher Windy Casey said. “But [doing small groups in] math is really just the last few years.”

Math specialist Keri Richburg oversees all training for middle school math teachers statewide through the Alabama Math Science and Technology Initiative, or AMSTI. She’s working to help more middle grade educators use small group instruction effectively.

“For a long time,” Richburg said, “it is something our K-5 friends have done a lot better at implementing in their classrooms than our sixth through eighth grade.” 

Richburg said that research supports the use of regular testing, called formative assessments, to help teachers figure out  which students need personalized help.

“The idea is that we’re using evidence of student learning and making in-the-moment decisions about our instruction for each of our students within those small groups,” she said. 

Related: College students are struggling with basic math. Professors blame the pandemic

Throughout Piedmont’s elementary and middle schools, soon after the start of the school year in August, students worked busily on their devices playing learning games or finding solutions to math problems while their math teacher worked with a small group in a space designed for up-close instruction. 

Those who weren’t using an iPad to work on their Individualized Learning Path, created from assessments of what a student needs or wants to learn, wrote in their math journals. 

In Holbrook’s class, she worked with four students in a small group on how to subtract 278 from 4,000, borrowing from the “0” in each place. Each student had a white board, and Holbrooks modeled the steps students needed to take, working with each student who needed additional attention.

Superintendent Hayes said when Piedmont’s math teachers first expanded small group instruction beyond reading in elementary grades five years ago, teachers said they didn’t have enough time in a regular class to do small group instruction well. So the district expanded math and English language arts to 80 minutes every day in the middle school and 120 minutes each day in the elementary school.

“We’ve always done small groups in reading. But [doing small groups in] math is really just the last few years.”

Third-grade teacher Windy Casey, Piedmont City schools

High school math teacher Landon Pruitt – who taught at the middle school until four years ago – said moving to 80-minute math classes made a big difference in his ability to work with students in small groups. 

“In a 52- or 53-minute class,” Pruitt said, “there’s no way you can consistently do [small groups] and work on getting through the standards that you have to cover.” 

The school also had to help teachers adjust classroom management techniques so that small groups and independent work could both occur effectively. Hayes said gave teachers a program to monitor each students’ screen simultaneously was the solution.

“I think our teachers will tell you that they have better control of the classroom and are able to see what’s going on in the classroom and address that immediately,” he said. 

Dreyfus said getting targeted small group instruction right is hard. “What it comes down to is: Are teachers being given the support, the resources, the time and development and space to do a hard job really well?”

Those are the pieces Hayes said the district wants to make sure are in place.

“I’m not sure we have a secret sauce or anything earth shattering,” Hayes said, “but we do have teachers and administrators committed to being intentional with data and letting that data drive small group instruction. Changing instruction in real time to meet our students where they are, may be the most important step in our data driven instructional process.”

This story was produced by AL.com as part of The Math Problem, a series by The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

The post ‘Data days’ and longer math classes: How one district is improving math scores appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEW YORK — I strap on a virtual reality headset. A screen appears and dramatic music pounds into my ears. I’m told there has been a nasty avalanche and that it’s my job to restore power to the grid.

The exercise is part of a new program that encourages learning middle school math through real world problem-solving, now in use in 190 school districts across 36 states.

The concept caught my attention during a demonstration at HolonIQ’s ‘Back to School’ summit in New York City earlier this month. The lesson seemed a lot more relevant than copying a row of equations from a chalkboard, which I remember from my own more traditional (and boring) math education so many years ago.

I was also intrigued because of the urgency of making math and science more meaningful for middle schoolers – these are the students who lost the most ground in math during the pandemic. It’s a little too early to know if VR lessons like this one will improve lagging test scores, but Anurupa Ganguly, founder and CEO of Prisms, the company behind the platform, is convinced it will.

“This is a whole new way of experiencing math instruction,” Ganguly, a former math and physics teacher, told me, pointing to promising early studies from the non-partisan research group WestEd, along with feedback from teachers and students on Prisms, which is hosted on the Meta Quest platform.

Instead of memorizing equations, students develop structural reasoning skills from solving real-life problems (such as a damaged power grid or limited hospital-bed capacity in a pandemic) with guidance from teachers trained in the purpose of the lessons.

Related: Inside the middle school math crisis

I sat through other new simulations at the summit as well, including Dreamscape Learn, something I’d heard and read about from a colleague who took a trip through its virtual Alien Zoo) and YouTube Player for Education, which is creating virtual lessons, content and assessments.

It’s never surprising to see and hear enormous enthusiasm for technology solutions at conferences: There are always a host of new apps and products on display that come and go. Entrepreneurs and investors packed Holon’s conference, eager to hear more about the global research and analytics platform’s latest survey results and reports on latest trends and ed tech for teaching and learning.

Naturally, that included lots of sessions on artificial intelligence, which many believe will be a bright spot for ed tech investing.

Instead of memorizing equations, students develop structural reasoning skills from solving real-life problems (such as a damaged power grid or limited hospital-bed capacity in a pandemic) with guidance from teachers trained in the purpose of the lessons.

Still, it’s impossible to ignore growing skepticism about the power of digital tools. Sweden moved away from tablets and technology this month in a return to more traditional ways of education – a backlash to its digital-heavy push that many in the country are blaming for student decline in basic skills. 

Sweden is instead embracing printed textbooks, teacher expertise, handwriting practice and quiet time. In addition, the recent UNESCO report entitled “An Ed-Tech Tragedy” documented vast inequality from pandemic-related reliance on technology during remote online learning, and concluded that lower-tech alternatives such as the distribution of schoolwork packets or delivering lessons via radio and televisionmight have been more equitable.

“The bright spots of the ed-tech experiences during the pandemic, while important and deserving of attention, were vastly eclipsed by failure,” the UNESCO researchers said in the report, which encourages schools to prioritize in-person learning and make sure that emerging technologies, including AI chatbots that many public schools are now banning, clearly benefit students before they are used.

Related: ‘We are going to have to be a little more nimble: how school districts are responding to AI

For her part, Ganguly is quick to note that Prisms is not an ed tech program, nor designed for remote learning: Once the VR headsets come off, teachers take over and guide students through the lessons. “Ninety percent of our resources are not in VR but in teacher training,” she told me.

I also raised questions about the use of ed-tech and screens during a session I moderated on early childhood education, where entrepreneur Joe Wolf, co-founder of the nonprofit Imagine Worldwide, described bringing solar-powered technology programs to remote areas in Africa, where few children have electricity and less than five percent have internet access; there’s also a dearth of trained teachers.

“There is no other technology in their lives,” Wolf noted, pointing to studies of a trial showing that children in Malawi not only loved using the program, they made significant gains in math and literacy using the program, despite pandemic disruption. Imagine Worldwide works with governments, communities, funders and other partners as it attempts to expand throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

“The bright spots of the ed-tech experiences during the pandemic, while important and deserving of attention, were vastly eclipsed by failure.”

UNESCO report, ‘An Ed-Tech Tragedy’

Ultimately, all of the problems both entrepreneurs and educators are trying to solve require a lot more research, noted Isabelle Hau of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, who was also on the panel, a view endorsed by Kumar Garg, vice president of partnerships at Schmidt Futures.

Garg spoke about “learning engineering,” and noted that pushback against education technology is a direct result of how quickly these tools rolled out in the pandemic.

“A billion kids got sent overnight home and we tried on the fly to create an online learning system with very little scaffolding,” Garg said, noting that it was impossible to know how many students were unenrolled and never even got online. “The crisis came, and everyone was like, ‘What’s the answer?’ ”

I suspect there never was one, as our team at The Hechinger Report found during this unprecedented interruption of education worldwide. But there is one result that is absolutely worth paying attention to: Plenty of entrepreneurs, foundations, nonprofit outlets, foundations and investors are looking for answers, and have new ideas that might (or might not) make a difference.

Regardless, we are eager to listen.

This story about teaching with VR was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters.

The post COLUMN: Can we find the solution to middle school math woes in a virtual world? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Kids around the country are still suffering academically from the pandemic. But more than three years after schools shut down, it’s hard to understand exactly how much ground students have lost and which children now need the most attention.

Three new reports offer some insights.  All three were produced by for-profit companies that sell assessments to schools. Unlike annual state tests, these interim assessments are administered at least twice a year and help track student progress, or learning, during the year. These companies may have a business motive in sounding an alarm to sell more of their product, but the reports are produced by well-regarded education statisticians.

The big picture is that kids at every grade are still behind where they would have been without the pandemic. All three reports look at student achievement in the spring of 2019, before the pandemic, and compare it to the spring of 2023. A typical sixth grader, for example, in the spring of 2023 was generally scoring much lower than a typical sixth grader in 2019.

The differences are in the details. One report says that students are still behind the equivalent of four to five months of school, but another says it’s one to three months. A third doesn’t measure months of lost learning, but notices the alarming 50 percent increase in the number of students who are still performing significantly below grade level.

Depending on how you slice and dice the data, older students in middle school and beyond seem to be in the most precarious position and younger children seem to be more resilient and recovering better. Yet, under a different spotlight, you can see troubling signs even among younger children. This includes the very youngest children who weren’t school age when the pandemic hit.

The most recent data, released on Aug. 28, 2023, is from Curriculum Associates, which sells i-Ready assessments taken by more than 11 million students across the country and focuses on “grade-level” skills.*  It counts the number of students in third grade, for example, who are able to read at a third-grade level or solve math problems that a third grader ought to be able to solve. The standards for what is grade-level achievement are similar to what most states consider to be “proficient” on their annual assessments.

The report concludes that the percentage of students who met grade-level expectations was “flat” over the past school year. This is one way of noting that there wasn’t much of an academic recovery between spring of 2022 and spring of 2023. Students of every age, on average, lagged behind where students had been in 2019.

For example, 69 percent of fourth graders were demonstrating grade-level skills in math in 2019. That dropped to 55 percent in 2022 and barely improved to 56 percent in 2023. (The drop in grade-level performance isn’t as dramatic for seventh and eighth graders, in part, because so few students were meeting grade-level expectations even before the pandemic.)

“It’s dang hard to catch up,” said Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates.

To make up for lost ground, students would have to learn more in a year than they typically do. That generally didn’t happen. Huff said this kind of extra learning is especially hard for students who missed foundational math and reading skills during the pandemic.

While most students learned at a typical pace during the 2022-23 school year, Curriculum Associates noted a starkly different and troubling pattern for children who are significantly below grade level by two or more years. Their numbers spiked during the pandemic and have not gone down. Even worse, these children learned less during the 2022-23 school year than during a typical pre-pandemic year. That means they are continuing to lose ground.

Huff highlighted three groups of children who need extra attention: poor readers in second, third and fourth grades; children in kindergarten and first grade, and middle school math students.

There’s been a stubborn 50 percent increase in the number of third and fourth graders who are two or more grade levels behind in reading, Huff said. For example, 19 percent of third graders were that far behind grade level in 2023, up from 12 percent in 2019.  “I find this alarming news,” said Huff, noting that these children were in kindergarten and first grade when the pandemic first hit. “They’re missing out on phonics and phonemic awareness and now they’re thrust into grades three and four,” she said. “If you’re two or more grade levels below in grade three, you’re in big trouble. You’re in big, big, big trouble. We’re going to be seeing evidence of this for years to come.”

The youngest students, who were just two to four years old at the start of the pandemic, are also behind. Huff said that kindergarteners and first graders started the 2022-23 school year at lower achievement levels than in the past. They may have missed out on social interactions and pre-school. “You can’t say my current kindergartener wasn’t in school during the pandemic so they weren’t affected,” said Huff.

Math achievement slipped the most after schools shuttered and switched to remote learning. And now very high percentages of middle schoolers are below grade level in the subject. Huff speculates that they missed out on foundational math skills, especially fractions and proportional reasoning.

Renaissance administered its Star tests to more than six million students around the country. Its spring 2023 report was released on Aug, 9. Like Curriculum Associates, Renaissance finds that, “growth is back, but performance is not,” according to Gene Kerns, Renaissance’s chief academic officer.** That means students are generally learning at a typical pace at school, but not making up for lost ground. Depending on the subject and the grade, students still need to recover between one and three months of instruction.

Math is rebounding better than reading. “Math went down an alarming amount, but has started to go back up,” Kerns said. “We’ve not seen much rebound to reading.” Reading achievement, however, wasn’t as harmed by school disruptions. 

Kerns generally sees a sunnier story for younger children and a more troubling picture for older students.

The youngest children in kindergarten and first grade are on par with pre-pandemic history, he said. Middle elementary school grades are a little behind but catching up. 

“The older the student, the more lingering the impact,” said Kerns. “The high school data is very alarming. If you’re a junior in high school, you only have one more year. There’s a time clock on this.” 

Seventh and eighth graders showed tiny decreases in annual learning in math and reading. Kerns says he’s “hesitant” to call it a “downward spiral.”

The third report come from NWEA, which administers the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Assessment to more than 6 million students. Its spring 2023 data, released on July 11, showed that students on average need four to five months of extra schooling, on top of the regular school year, to catch up. This graph below, is a good summary of how much students are behind as expressed in months of learning.

Spring 2023 achievement gaps and months of schooling required to catch up to pre-COVID achievement levels

Like the Renaissance report, the NWEA report shows a bigger learning loss in math than in reading, and indicates that older students have been more academically harmed by the pandemic. They’ll need more months of extra schooling to catch up to where they would have been had the pandemic never happened. It could take years and years to squeeze these extra months of instruction in and many students may never receive them.

From my perspective, Renaissance and NWEA came to similar conclusions for most students. The main difference is that Renaissance has additional assessment data for younger children in kindergarten through second grade, showing a recovery, and high school data, showing a worse deterioration. The discrepancies in their measurement of months of learning loss, whether it’s four to five months or one to three months, is inconsequential. Both companies admit these assumption-filled estimates are imprecise.

One of the most substantial differences among the reports is that Curriculum Associates is sounding an alarm bell for kindergarteners and first graders while Renaissance is not.

The three reports all conclude that kids are behind where they would have been without the pandemic. But some sub-groups are doing much worse than others. The students who are the most behind and continuing to spiral downward really need our attention. Without extra support, their pandemic slump could be lifelong. 

* Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that more than 3 million students took i-Ready assessments.

** Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Gene Kerns’s last name.

This story about pandemic recovery was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

The post PROOF POINTS: Three views of pandemic learning loss and recovery appeared first on The Hechinger Report.