Educator

Jack Goodwin was already struggling with math in middle school when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, upending his education even more. His mom, Shelly, knew he needed extra help to catch up.

But Shelly Goodwin couldn’t find a tutor in their small town of Paris, about four hours south of Chicago.

“I would ask the teachers, ‘Do you know anybody that tutors or can you tutor?’,” Shelly Goodwin said. “They would try to meet with [Jack] after school but they had five or six kids after school and they would say, ‘We don’t really know anyone that tutors around here.’”

With reading and math scores plummeting during the pandemic, educators and parents are now turning their attention to how kids can catch up. In the following Q&A, Susanna Loeb, an education economist at Brown University, shines a light on the best ways to use tutoring to help students get back on track.

Sonnemann said Australia should look to the US in expanding research in tutoring, pointing to Brown University using targeted studies with government districts to examine the roll-out of small-group tuition programs and how well they help students catch up.

She said given the size of NSW’s COVID-19 tutoring initiative, it was vital parents and schools know how well it was working and governments should consider rolling out long-term, systematic catch-up tuition.