Advocacy

Nearly $2 billion in federal pandemic aid is landing in the bank accounts of Dallas-area schools to help students recover from the pandemic.

The money — which state leaders announced this spring would flow to Texas schools — has a few strings attached. Districts must spend it on addressing student needs.

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DISD is part of a national collaborative working with researchers at Brown University to study how to maximize the impact of tutoring. Brown’s National Student Support Accelerator points to research showing that tutoring interventions can translate to between three and 15 additional months of learning.

The American Rescue Plan requires states to spend at least 5 percent of the money allotted for K-12 schools— about $6 billion nationwide—on helping students make up for lost instructional time. Similarly, local school districts must spend at least 20 percent of their allocation on this objective. High-impact tutoring is an evidence based strategy proven to boost academic achievement, social-emotional development, and other outcomes. While tutoring can take many forms and often includes a mentoring component, Brown University’s National Student Support Accelerator defines high-impact tutoring as “a form of teaching, one-on-one or in a small group, toward a specific goal” that supplements, but does not replace, classroom instruction.

With the return to in-person learning in sight, K-12 leaders are urgently setting priorities for the coming school year. Each spring, educators are eager to find that “just right” approach to their biggest challenges. As a former middle and high school principal, I know that’s especially true after a tough year—and no year has been tougher than this one.

For many leaders, accelerating student learning is top-of-mind, and one method that has garnered a lot of recent attention is high-impact tutoring. The National Student Support Accelerator, founded this year at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University to promote and support high-impact tutoring, defines it as one-to-one or small-group support that supplements classroom learning and complements existing curriculum by focusing on specific goals in response to individual students’ needs. This kind of tutoring is also known as “high-intensity tutoring” or “high-dosage tutoring.”