A Solution To Keeping Poor Students From Dropping Out

(The image at left was found at Head In The Sand.)

We have a serious problem in this country with students failing to finish high school. These dropouts have more problems finding a job, making a decent living, winding up on government programs, and having problems with the criminal justice system.

One of the major reasons for students dropping out is that they fall further behind (especially in math and reading) until they give up because they can no longer compete with the other students. This is not a major problem for the middle and upper classes, because they can afford to hire tutors to correct the problem. But working class and poor students don't have this solution available, and they make up the majority of dropouts.

There is a solution, if we just have the political will to embrace it. And embracing that solution will actually be less expensive that letting those students drop out. Consider this article (part of which I post below) by Debra Bruno at Politico.com.

When middle-class kids stumble academically, their parents will often enlist pricey private tutors to get them back on track. No parent who can afford to intervene wants to risk their child falling behind or losing crucial tenths of a point off their class ranking. But that one-on-one remedy doesn’t exist for poor students. When they fall behind in subjects such as math, which depend on cumulative mastery of skills, they often stay that way. And the persistent failure of poor students to make up ground has become accepted as proof that no intervention—not even tutoring— can reverse the slide once a student has reached a certain age.

But a recent study run out of the University of Chicago’s Urban Labs of high school students in Chicago has proven that the conventional wisdom is wrong. And the results have the potential to change the ways educators think about one of the most confounding problems they face: How to keep kids on track academically.

In the 2013-14 school year, Chicago officials brought in a tutoring system created in the Match Charter Public School in Boston and ran a randomized controlled trial of 2,718 boys in 9th and 10th grade from a dozen public high schools in some of the poorest areas of the city. The students were matched with tutors, many of them recent college graduates with only about 100 hours of training. The results: higher math test scores, higher math grades, fewer math failures, and even fewer failures in nonmath courses. The improvement in math grades was the equivalent of going from a 1.77 GPA to a GPA of 2.35 (effectively a jump from a C- to a C+), says Meghan Howard, chief academic officer of Harvard’s Education Innovation Laboratory.

It’s not the first time research has affirmed the positive effects of tutoring. In 1984, Chicago educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that tutoring gave students a bump of two standard deviations above students in a control group. In other words, most of the tutored students ended up performing better than 98 percent of the students in the control group. The biggest sticking point, though, was that school districts couldn’t afford to provide each student with a teacher, or even small groups of two or three, despite the success. . . .

The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution called for scaling up the program across the country to all students in the 3rd through 10th grades who are two or more grade levels behind in math.

Here are six of the biggest lessons learned from the Chicago study:

1. It’s never too late. Conventional wisdom has long been that the older a student gets, the harder it is to get back on track. Julia Quinn, associate director of both the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab and Education Lab, says that by the time a disadvantaged student reaches adolescence, “many folks have given up on moving the needle.” Struggling students were channeled instead into vocational training. The evidence from the Chicago study is proof, she says, “that you really can change the academic trajectory and growth – even in high school.” In Chicago, the students who were chosen for tutoring learned the equivalent of an extra one to two years’ worth of math, researchers say.

2. Math might be easier to fix than reading. Tutoring in math seems an especially good fit for older students, possibly because without having mastered basic concepts, students are lost in higher-level classes. Alan Safran, a co-founder of SAGA Innovations and former executive director of the Match Schools in Boston, which brought the tutoring program to Chicago, says he found that math was the most “tutorable” and that it was easier to find “a phenomenal supply” of math tutors. Older students seem to have a harder time achieving the same gains in reading, possibly because language-based learning needs to be better anchored for kids just learning to read, say researchers.

3. Don’t promote without mastery. Tutoring that constantly checks in and tests before moving on to the next level is most effective. Research has shown that 9th grade algebra is an essential skill and a predictor of future success: Students who fail are far more likely not to go on to graduate, while students who pass algebra will get that diploma. But many poor kids come into algebra as many as three to five years below their grade level. “Our job is to catch the kids up who are three, four, six years behind,” says Safran. “Some kids are missing basic skills.” The two-on-one tutoring sessions also make sure that the pairs of students are well-matched, so that one student who is three grade levels below isn’t paired with one who is just one grade level off.

4. Not as expensive as other remedies. Instead of certified classroom teachers, this program hires tutors that include recent college grads, professionals looking to change careers and retirees. One of the advantages of relying on recent graduates, says Alan Mather, chief officer of College and Career Success for Chicago Public Schools, is that students realize “people my age can understand it.” In Chicago, says Safran, the program has about 23 applicants for every spot, a surprising number given that the tutors earn $15 an hour, plus benefits. Even with lower costs for tutors, this kind of tutoring is estimated to cost about $3,800 per student. At a larger scale, that number could go down to $2,500 per student, notes a report on the study from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Funding for tutoring, which is now being conducted in New York and Chicago, has come from nonprofits, state budgets and federal aid for schools with high numbers of low-income families.

5. Don’t make it an afterthought. In-school tutoring means that it’s a regular class period during the school day. “Most tutoring is an after-school afterthought,” says Safran. In fact, he says, tutoring often fails for high-need kids because either they don’t show up for after-school programs or the tutor who does come to help has no idea what the student did during his school day. The project in Boston, which began in 2004, worked because the charter school was able to add hours to the school day. In Chicago, students receive course credit just as they would any other class.

6. Other good stuff happens, too. Although researchers are hesitant to tout other gains, the math tutoring seems to have some other benefits, even bumping up other grades. The jury is still out on whether the effects lead to better high school graduation rates, but since the study started with 9th and 10th grades in 2013, those answers should be available soon, says Quinn. Jonathan Guryan, a Northwestern University economics professor who was also part of the study, says, “We do see that many of the students engage with math in a way that they hadn’t for a long time. It’s possible that their feelings with the sense of success in math also changes the way that they engage with the rest of school.” It might even have a “positive spillover to other classes because it changes their sense of who they are as a student and how they can be successful in engaging with the work.” Rita Raichoudhuri, the former principal of Wells Community Academy High School, one of the Chicago schools picked for the program, says, that in addition to getting better at math concepts and doing better in regular math class, the tutoring helped the students improve their relationships and develop better study skills. The Chicago tutoring program also provided a violence prevention course called Becoming a Man to some of the students. Becoming a Man has reduced violent arrests by 50 percent and increased high school graduation by 19 percent.