Then, in December, researchers from Stanford and the National Student Support Accelerator published an academic paper with more details about Washington’s reported increase in school attendance. Lee and his research team analyzed the tutoring schedules of more than 4,000 students and calculated that a student was 7% less likely to miss school on a day when tutoring was scheduled, compared to a day when tutoring was not planned. calendar. The researchers thought that perhaps students felt like they were learning during these sessions, or appreciated the personal attention and looked forward to them.
Tutoring times ranged from once a week to daily. A student required to receive tutoring three times per week, the recommended minimum for effective remedial tutoring, would attend a total of 1.3 additional school days, on average, over a 180-day school year.
“It seems minimal, just a day or two,” Lee admitted. But she said it was “encouraging to make things happen” with this group of economically disadvantaged students. More than 80 percent of the students supervised were black. The rest were largely Hispanic.
What struck me was the high average absenteeism rate among the thousands of students selected for tutoring: 17 percent. In other words, these students had missed more than 30 days, not including weekends. Many of them – one in six – were considered “extremely absent,” missing more than 30 percent of the school year. That’s about 60 school days. “They are missing school at an alarming rate,” Lee said.
It’s no wonder these children and adolescents are so far behind. It is therefore not surprising that leaders in Washington wanted tutors for these children, who were at risk of falling further behind and, ultimately, dropping out.
I contacted Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, an organization that works with schools to increase attendance, to ask how important an extra day of school might be for chronically absent students. She said it’s important to work with children who miss 30 days of school. “I’m a little concerned that this small change (1.3), while promising, may not be enough to make a difference,” she said in an email.
Chang consulted with his research team and they found a positive: small gains can add up in a school. For a student, 1.3 days is not a lot, Chang said. But for 100 students, that’s 130 days more. “This could be a movement toward more stability in classrooms,” Chang said.
Averages mask big differences. Attendance for some students increased much more. Middle school students were most likely to attend school on a tutoring day, which translates to 2.1 additional school days for a student scheduled three times a week. High school students were the least likely to be motivated to attend school. Their attendance was not significantly different between days with and without tutoring. Tutoring scheduled during the school day was more of an incentive to show up than tutoring scheduled after school. Smaller tutor-to-student ratios, 1:1 or 1:2, were more effective in reducing absenteeism than larger tutoring groups of three or four students. (All tutoring took place in person and not online.)
Much of what schools actually attempt in education is rarely rigorously studied and analyzed. Research like this helps school leaders think about what works and what doesn’t. Washington deserves credit for trying tutoring, which has proven highly beneficial in hundreds of previous, albeit smaller, studies, and for opening its doors to researchers to study its large-scale deployment.
This didn’t work as well as hoped for a variety of reasons. Some private lessons were not scheduled as often as research suggested, or during the school day, when attendance is highest. But the key lesson we learn from this analysis is that some students may be too disengaged from school to benefit from even well-designed tutoring programs. There’s no point in hiring tutors for students who don’t show up.
The Stanford study makes the argument that tutoring itself helps re-engage children in school and that any improvement in school attendance is worth it. But I question the economic value when the benefit is so minimal.
I don’t envy school leaders. They’re dealing with masses of disengaged students and we don’t have good solutions for them.
