Just before winter break, a tutor I work with in Akron Public Schools stated what had become soberingly obvious based upon students’ December test results: “In order to work with all the third, fourth and fifth graders who need to get to grade level, we have to sacrifice our time with first and second graders. There’re just not enough of us.”
Nationwide, the longer schools were 100% remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, the farther behind students in those districts fell. Tutors like myself are tasked with teaching grade-level skills such as multiplication and division to fourth and fifth graders (they were kindergartners and first graders when APS was remote) who have yet to master addition and subtraction.
Disparities among affluent and poorer districts had been slowly shrinking in the years before the pandemic. Those gains were vaporized in schools that remained closed to in-person learning longterm. Many students fell a year or more behind in both math and reading.
Intensive, small-group tutoring has proven an effective tool to help kids get to grade level, which is why the federal government, and many states, have invested in it. But not all tutoring is equally beneficial.
Akron schools are not alone in questioning the Ohio legislature’s offer of grant money for tutoring that can only be spent on tutoring by private companies. And these services only target fourth graders who did not pass what were, until late last summer, the reading requirements for promotion from the third to the fourth grade.
I wrote about Gov. Mike DeWine’s deeply misguided decision to promote last year’s third graders who did qualify, children whom I know well. In the second semester of the last school year, I worked every day with a group of third graders who read just below grade level. My job was to get them to grade level by the time they took the year-end reading test.
Then, for the entire month of June, I worked with another group of students who had not passed that year-end test. We worked for six hours a day, five days a week, in Akron’s Third Grade Reading Academy. Our mornings were spent on an intensive phonics program and in the afternoons we worked on reading comprehension.
I was struck by how my students with the lowest reading skills most enjoyed the morning phonics. As we broke down English into its various letter combinations, these students had several “Ah-ha” moments as the patterns and rules began to click for them. Anyone who has worked on something difficult knows the specific joy that comes with the mastery of once-elusive concepts.
Six of my eight students in the Third Grade Reading Academy passed the Ohio State Test. One of the two who did not was a student I called Tyronne in a previous column. Tyronne worked very hard in my class, which paid off because his score improved by 30 points. That put him in a strong position to acquire the skills to become fourth grade ready when repeating the third grade.
It is important to note that holding back third graders who cannot read at grade level does not stigmatize them. According to a story in the New York Times, “A [2023] Boston University study found that those held back did not have any negative outcomes such as increased absences or placement in special education programs. On the contrary, they did much better several years later in sixth-grade English tests compared with those who just missed being held back. Gains from being held back were particularly large for Black and Hispanic students.”
In other words, the folks down in Columbus blew it last year by promoting third graders who could not read at grade level and now they want to remedy their wrong-headed decision by giving those same students after-school online tutoring with people in Missouri.
That is just plain dumb.
A large factor in this year’s fourth graders being so far behind is that Akron schools were entirely remote for a full year during the pandemic. There is no credible reason to believe that remote tutoring, with people who do not know the students or the district, will fix the problems caused by remote learning.
When students are tutored in person, their tutors are part of a collaborative team that includes other tutors, the classroom teachers, the principal and the assistant principal. These teams know the students, their history both in and out of school, their strengths and weaknesses. Teams work collaboratively to teach each child.
Would Akron’s students benefit from additional funds for tutoring? Absolutely. But not the kind of tutoring for which the state has limited the grant funds. As school board member Rene Molenaur pointed out in a recent school board meeting, students would be far better served if the state gave the district $200,000 for expanded tutoring.
The state should support expanded tutoring, which our students direly need, by funding the expansion of services provided by the people in our school buildings. Anything else is a cruel waste of time and money.
This column first appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal on February 4, 2024.
Whoopsie Piggle 