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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.

Complementing the efforts of community-focused staff across the University, from the Annenberg Institute to the Swearer Center, the new community engagement specialist will seek opportunities for the Library to build on Brown’s support for K-12 education in Rhode Island’s diverse urban core and beyond. The specialist will find ways to enable young students to spend more time in University Library spaces and learn the research tools and techniques that position them for success in higher education. The Library will also work with school teachers to provide access to archival materials that could help pique students’ intellectual curiosity.

Minnesota is fortunate to be home to three of the four programs identified by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University as “Examples of effective tutoring models,” including Minnesota Reading Corps, Minnesota Math Corps, and Reading Partners (which is a current grantee of our foundation). These programs include multiday training, provide tutors with detailed curriculum and materials, and measure success through research-based assessments to ensure academic gains.