Provides families in South Dakota with an educational savings account (ESA). The bill requires The Department of Education to create a savings account for students who withdrew from public schools and currently attend a non-public school. Public funds are deposited into SEAs and are used to aid students in receiving various educational resources, most relevant is private tutoring.
Provides Idaho caregivers with children in grades K-12 with educational grants of up to $1,000 per student, per year, and up to $3,000 per household. Grants are funded through the $50 million “Empowering Parents Grants” program, an initiative to address pandemic-related learning loss and part of Gov. Brad Little’s “Leading Idaho” initiative. The grant program supports families in acquiring a wide range of education-related expenses, some of which include technology, textbooks, tutoring and therapy services, etc.
Funds $47 million in emergency assistance to address the disruptions and challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes a $1.3 million allocation for the teacher pipeline of which $789,730 goes towards the expansion of the Georgia Math & Reading Corps program in Southwest Georgia. The emergency assistance fund allows colleges and universities across Georgia to recruit college students to serve as tutors, specifically in rural districts.
Required K-3 students who received a failing grade in a subject to receive tutoring during the first nine weeks of school. The bill also required additional accelerated instruction for students who continue to receive failing grades in any subject for subsequent grading periods. Schools would have been required to form a committee for each student requiring instruction. The committee would have been responsible for developing an educational plan for the student that would provide accelerated instruction over the course of the semester.
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.