Even as students in Arkansas and across the nation struggle to recover from a "learning recession" that began more than a decade ago, a Stanford University researcher says parents should feel good about their children's access to quality tutoring.
Federal pandemic aid for schools dried up in the years following the initial COVID-19 outbreak, but many states have kept up tutoring efforts that were launched at the time, according to Nancy Waymack, director of partnerships and policy for the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford.
"As the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief dollars went away, we were concerned that tutoring might go away with them," Waymack said. "That wasn't really what we found."
Waymack, who grew up in Arkadelphia, is among the authors of a new snapshot report published Wednesday on tutoring policies in the United States. The report praises many states, including Arkansas, for maintaining strong investments in funding high-impact tutoring, implementation support and policy following the expiration of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, a pot of money Congress made available to states through a series of stimulus bills in 2020 and 2021.
It also warns states now are "entering a more complex phase" that requires them to secure permanent funding sources, develop new accountability measures and build out the infrastructure to support these tutoring efforts if they hope to continue reversing academic declines.
The 2026 Education Scorecard, an analysis of student performance across thousands of school districts, said math and reading performance dropped over the past decade in most places. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the decline, though researchers said student performance began slipping in the mid-2010s.
Student performance has partly rebounded from the damage done by COVID-19, according to the Education Scorecard. The average Arkansas student performed nearly .14 grade-level equivalents above where they were in 2022, the study said. The state ranked 22 out of 38 states in academic growth in math between 2022 and 2025, the report said. Arkansas' section of the 2026 report only included information on math scores, not reading.
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