This was our second year attending the National Student Support Accelerator Annual Research Conference, and it was well worth the trip!
Tutoring is often prone to hype, but this was a serious group of people sharing serious ideas and findings. No outlandish claims of impacts or silver bullets, rather careful research showing effect sizes of ~0.02 to ~0.20, and a commitment to doing the hard work in the years to come identifying which programs and approaches have the highest impact, what are the non-negotiables in effective tutoring, and how do you finance and sustainably scale high-impact tutoring to serve all of the students who need it most.
It was great to see a larger district (Los Angeles Unified School District, Metro Nashville Public Schools, San Francisco Unified School District, Hillsborough County Public Schools, Jackson Public Schools, Palo Alto Unified School District, Fulton County Schools, Chicago Public Schools, Cambridge Public Schools, Oakland Unified School District, Guilford County Schools, Berkeley Unified School District, Toledo Public Schools, Ector County ISD, Arlington Public Schools, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools) and state (Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, Oregon Department of Education, UF Lastinger Center for Learning, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education, New Mexico Public Education Department) presence this year compared to last year, which reaffirmed that the scholarship on high-impact tutoring is attracting real-world interest with real effects on actual students.
That’s no trivial thing in education, and Susanna Loeb and team should be proud.