Extra tutoring has helped get Fort Worth students back on track. Will the money run out?
Two years ago, Texas lawmakers passed a bill requiring school districts to offer extra tutoring for students who were struggling as a result of school shutdowns.
School officials in the Fort Worth area say that extra help has gone a long way to getting struggling students back on track. But the federal money that funds those programs is set to expire next year.
A new state budget proposal includes grant money that districts could use to fund academic support programs, including tutoring. School officials are asking lawmakers to approve money to allow them to extend those tutoring programs once federal funding ends.
“I do think if we stopped now, it’s too soon,” said Michael McFarland, superintendent of the Crowley Independent School District. “And so we could very easily lose the gains that we’ve made.”
Texas law requires tutoring for students who failed STAAR
House Bill 4545, which lawmakers passed in the 2021 legislative session, requires districts to provide 30 hours of tutoring for each section that students failed on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. Districts across the state have funded those expanded tutoring programs with federal money intended to help districts overcome the academic effects of the pandemic. Districts must spend the last of that money by September 2024. Any money not spent by then must be sent back.
A provision in House Bill 1, the proposed state budget bill for the 2023 legislative session, includes $30 million for “intensive educational supports.” The bill, which was filed Wednesday, states that the Texas Education Agency may use that funding to provide grants to school districts, public charter schools and regional education service centers to fund programs that ensure students perform on grade level and graduate ready for college, careers or the military. The bill lists tutoring programs as one of several possible uses for those grants.
During a Fort Worth Independent School District board meeting in December, Superintendent Angélica Ramsey named funding for tutoring as a proposed priority for the 2023 legislative session. She noted that the new tutoring requirement will remain in effect even after the federal money that funds it expires. District leaders aren’t asking lawmakers to lift the new tutoring requirements, Ramsey said. Rather, they want the state to provide funding once federal relief money runs out, so they can continue to give struggling students the extra help that the law requires.
Under the law, tutoring is supposed to take place in groups no larger than three students to one tutor. But in practice, many large districts, including Fort Worth ISD, have struggled to comply with that requirement. Officials in both the Fort Worth and Dallas school districts said last year that they couldn’t find enough tutors to meet that threshold.
Marcey Sorensen, chief academic officer for Fort Worth ISD, said the district is working “as diligently as we can” to reach the 3-1 student to tutor ratio required in state law, but the district hasn’t yet met that threshold. Some campuses are closer than others, she said, because the number of students who need tutoring varies so much from one school to another.
The district has seen academic gains since the beginning of the pandemic. On last year’s STAAR exams, 38% of the district’s third-graders scored on grade level in reading. Although that figure still puts the district behind the state as a whole, it represents growth not only over the previous year, but also over where the district was in the spring of 2019, before the pandemic began.
Sorensen said a combination of factors, including tutoring required by House Bill 4545, likely led to that growth. The district also used federal relief money to fund a number of other academic programs, including expanded summer school and Saturday learning opportunities. Those efforts also happened alongside a major overhaul of the district’s philosophy of teaching reading and the rollout of a new math curriculum. It’s hard to say exactly which of those factors led to that growth in reading, Sorensen said, but the expanded instruction time has been “a godsend” for students in need of extra help.
If state lawmakers don’t come up with money to extend those programs after federal money ends, the district would have to make some hard decisions about what programs to keep and which ones to end, Sorensen said. That would probably involve making creative use of other supplemental federal money the district receives each year, Sorensen said.
“I think all districts, not just Fort Worth ISD, are going to have to take a look at ourselves and say how do we allocate funds differently and more effectively, so that we’re getting academic return on investment,” she said. “Because there will still be kids with great academic needs, and we will have to address those needs.”
Bryce Nieman, a spokesman for the Keller Independent School District, said the district offered tutoring to students who didn’t pass the state test during and after the regular school day, and also during the summer. During the 2021-22 school year, the district spent about $336,000 on tutoring, he said, and last June, it spent $1.2 million on expanded summer school offerings.
If state lawmakers don’t approve money to replace the federal funding when it ends, the district won’t be able to offer students as much support after school and during the summer, Nieman said. The district will be able to use other money to fund those programs as it did before the pandemic, he said, but that money won’t go as far.
Crowley ISD chief says ending programs could jeopardize progress
McFarland, the Crowley ISD superintendent, said he’d like lawmakers to find funding to extend those programs for at least another two years. The expanded tutoring and other programs have already helped students overcome the gaps left in their learning by the pandemic, he said. He worries that ending those programs now could put all that progress at risk.
When lawmakers enacted the new tutoring requirement, principals in the district put together learning plans that included 30 extra hours of instruction for students who didn’t pass a section on the state test, McFarland said. That instruction happens before, during and after the school day, on Saturdays and also during the summer, he said.
The district can already point to progress from that extra help, he said: All of its elementary schools received an A or B rating in the Texas Education Agency’s 2022 A-F accountability scores. In 2019, the last year letter grades were issued, no elementary school in Crowley ISD received above a C rating. McFarland said that progress at the elementary school level came about in large part because of the programs the district put in place in response to House Bill 4545.
The new tutoring requirement has given the district the opportunity to experiment with different ways of offering that instruction to find out what works best, McFarland said. The district has found that the most effective tutoring happens in small groups of two to three students with a single tutor, he said. That small-group format offers opportunities that don’t exist in a typical classroom setting, he said. When a teacher is working with an entire class of students at once, there’s no way to drill down on the specific needs of any single student, he said. But when tutors work with groups of two or three students, they can get a better idea of each one’s specific area of weakness and focus most of their efforts there, he said.
What’s less effective, he said, is offering more broad-based tutorials in which a teacher covers material for larger groups of students during special, voluntary tutoring sessions outside of their regular classes. It’s harder to target the instruction to any one student’s specific needs in that format, he said.
Online tutoring could be as effective as in-person, UT prof says
Sarah Woulfin, a professor of education leadership and policy in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin, acknowledged that it’s been difficult for large districts like Fort Worth ISD to find enough tutors to make that small-group format workable. Districts who are struggling to recruit enough tutors may have other options, she said, including contracting with vendors to provide tutoring online.
Although school districts across the country struggled to provide effective instruction online during school shutdowns, Woulfin said an online format for one-on-one tutoring could be almost as effective as in-person tutoring sessions, provided that it was implemented well. Keeping a class of two dozen or more students engaged via Zoom is more challenging for most educators than working with a single student online, she said.
But online tutoring would come with its own set of challenges, she said. Early in the pandemic, when districts shifted classes online, they learned that many students didn’t have high-speed internet access at home. Districts handed out Wi-Fi hotspots to students who needed them to participate in online classes, but most school leaders acknowledged the hotspots were an imperfect, short-term solution. The hot spots weren’t strong enough to support more than one student trying to participate in online classes at once, meaning households with more than one child in school still had problems.
Woulfin said districts looking to implement online tutoring would need to make sure students have access to a reliable high-speed internet connection, a computer or tablet, a pair of headphones and a quiet place to work during tutoring sessions.
Parents also need to pay attention to whether the online tutoring programs the districts are rolling out are high-quality, Woulfin said. While some online tutoring programs have been successful in helping students make up gaps in their learning from school shutdowns, other, less successful programs look more like homework help. Good online tutoring programs allow students to build positive, productive working relationships with their tutors, she said. For that to happen, it’s important that students be working with the same tutor each time, she said.
It’s also important that students get tutoring that’s aligned with the instruction they get in their regular classes, she said. Tutors may work with students on different activities or focus on different things, she said, but that instruction should always complement what’s going on in the classroom. Parents should also pay attention to whether there’s consistent communication between their child’s tutor and their teachers, she said. Teachers need to know if students are working on a particular set of skills in tutoring so they can build on that progress in class, she said.
But whether tutoring takes place online or in person, it’s important that it happens in small groups, Woulfin said. Keeping tutoring groups to three students or fewer can help those students focus better, she said. But more importantly, that format helps tutors pinpoint the exact areas where students need help and focus on those skills.
“It’s really kind of tailored and fitting exactly what the students need at a particular time,” Woulfin said. “I think that individualized focus to tutoring really, really matters.”
This story was originally published January 23, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
