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A study shows that giving the public more opportunities to converse with school board leaders could increase civic engagement and lead to more public trust in officials — especially among low-income groups and people of color.

Schools in the U.S. are set to receive $123 billion in federal pandemic relief funding. Across the country, parents and school administrators are engaging in spirited debates about whether to teach critical race theory. And Americans are bitterly divided in their opinions about how and when to resume in-person instruction following rising rates of vaccination against COVID-19.

The new National Student Support Accelerator, housed at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, launched to accelerate the growth of high-impact tutoring opportunities for K–12 students in need. The accelerator coordinates and synthesizes tutoring research and uses that research to develop publicly available tools and technical assistance to support districts and schools to develop high-impact tutoring programs for students.

“This is a big infrastructure commitment,” Little said. “Dallas ISD — and no district really — has tried to have that many tutors come in a short amount of time. We’re going to have to be really creative and exhaustive in exploring every avenue to source tutors.”

DISD will partner with Brown University’s National Student Support Accelerator, Little said, as it moves forward. The initiative works to create effective, research-based tutoring programs across the country.

Recently, University of Virginia education assistant professor Beth Schueler co-wrote a policy brief with Carly D. Robinson, Matthew A. Kraft and Susanna Loeb at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute that discussed how both can be viable methods and what the research says about how to design effective programs. The brief was written for policymakers and practitioners currently crafting their approaches to helping students who have fallen behind due to COVID-19.

The early phase of the Common Core State Standards gave a boost to well-off students, but didn’t provide significant help to disadvantaged students’ scores on a national test, according to research released earlier this week.

The study by Josh Bleiberg, a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University, also found that—based on scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the no-stakes test from the federal government—students in states that were relatively early common-core implementers fared better than their slower-moving peers.

Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor of education at Brown and a Public Education Committee member, noted that the Fund is one of a significant number of Brown community initiatives and academic programs that support Providence public schools. He said that, as someone dedicated to a scholarly career in support of educational equity and racial justice, the opportunity to have a direct and immediate impact on students and schools provides an ideal complement to the longer-term impact of his research on urban school reform.

“There is a lot of evidence that tutoring can produce large learning gains for a wide range of students, especially students who have fallen behind,” says Carly Robinson, a postdoctoral research associate at the institute. “Tutoring raised to the top of the list of what could put a dent in unprecedented learning loss. Tutoring works.”

The institute quickly developed the National Student Support Accelerator, still in its startup phase, to bring together researchers, schools and donors to help give K-12 students nationwide access to tutoring. Robinson says the goal is to make tutoring effective and then implement that effectiveness at scale.

High-Impact tutoring — i.e., tutoring delivered three or more times a week by consistent, trained tutors using quality materials and data to inform instruction — is one of the most effective academic interventions, providing an average of more than four months of additional learning in elementary literacy and almost 10 months in high school math, according to research from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University (learn more here). The National Student Support Accelerator offers open-source Accelerator tools and resources to help ensure more equitable access to quality tutoring. These research-backed tools and supports are easy to use and downloadable, and are designed to make structuring, implementing and scaling high-quality, high-impact tutoring programs as straightforward as possible.