In a small classroom with bright walls, three children gather for a lesson about blended sounds and rhyming words — material that the second graders did not fully grasp as they learned to read during the pandemic. Mary-Anne Welch, their tutor, holds up a card that shows a letter combination with a related picture.
S-T, the children sound out. Then: “Stool!”
S-N, they start again. “Snake!”
“Oooh,” worries Jayden Beal, jumping back as if he is scared.
So begins another session in Guilford County, where Welch works to recover lost learning with high-fives and a whirl of activities. The hope here is that “high dosage” tutoring — frequent and intensive — helps fill in for what children missed when covid-19 upended education.
The North Carolina district, with 68,000 students, is among thousands across the country coming up with ways for students to reclaim the skills and learning they need to succeed academically. But even with billions of federal relief dollars, many districts are slow to tackle a problem unprecedented in its magnitude.
“What districts have been doing is the equivalent of launching bottle rockets at the moon — directionally correct but not sized to the task,” said Thomas Kane, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the Center for Education Policy Research.
Kane and other researchers at Harvard and Stanford recently used state and national test scores in 29 states to create a district-by-district picture of achievement loss from spring 2019 to spring 2022. Their work shows that Virginia students, for instance, lost more than a school year’s worth of growth in math in Fairfax County and nearly two years in Richmond. Nationally, students from higher-poverty districts fared worst.