The Los Angeles Unified School District is officially on the hook for providing high-dosage tutoring to students after a judge approved a settlement reached last fall.
After being accused of denying students their right to equitable education during pandemic shutdowns, the district must now provide 100,000 students — more than a quarter of the district’s TK-12 students — with three years of high-dosage tutoring under a court-approved settlement, amounting to more than 10 million hours. District staff and outside vendors will provide students with a mix of virtual and in-person sessions.
“The District is conducting a program evaluation of the tutoring program, which will explore variation in the implementation, take-up, and impact on student outcomes across a range of tutoring models and vendors,” LAUSD said in a statement to EdSource.
The tutoring mandate stems from a court-approved settlement reached in October and finalized last month in Shaw et al. v. LAUSD et al., a lawsuit filed during the Covid-19 pandemic that alleged that only 60% of the district’s students participated in virtual instruction during the spring 2020 semester, denying them “basic educational equality guaranteed to them by the California Constitution.”
LAUSD would continue to use its already existing high-dose tutoring eligibility criteria to determine which students receive the support. The district did not specify how it would measure the program’s success.
The settlement
The high-dosage tutoring that Los Angeles Unified maintains it has been providing relies on money from the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP). The lawsuit, which includes other supports outlined in the settlement, gained final approval on Feb. 18 and is intended to help close learning gaps and improve academic performance.
The method specifically caters to students’ individual needs and provides either small group or one-on-one support that complements what they learn in the classroom, according to the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University.
“Evidence does suggest that that kind of effort would boost student outcomes,” said Morgan Polikoff, a USC professor of education.
“But I think it’s not likely to fully solve the problem, both because it’s missing a portion of the student population — a pretty sizable one — and also because I don’t know if that’s enough hours to solve the problem,” he said, referring to the fact that only a quarter of the student population will receive these services.
Ned Hillenbrand, a partner with Kirkland & Ellis LLP and one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, emphasized the importance of accountability moving forward.
“Our families understood that these issues affected students across the district. They admirably pursued remedial programs for those students as well as their own children,” Hillenbrand said in the statement.
“Now that the court has approved the settlement, our goal is to hold LAUSD accountable and to maximize the benefits students receive during the three-year enforcement period.”