News

  • | GBH News

    Nathaniel Schwartz, an education researcher at Brown University, said districts could also consider tutoring programs, summer school offerings and nightmarish-sounding "double-dose algebra" courses to make up for learning losses.

    But first and foremost, he said, kids need to return to school buildings to form strong in-person relationships with adults.

    "The schools that seem to have been most successful across this time period are those that have found ways to provide strong connection and support while continuing to push forward on the academic pieces," Schwartz said. "And that's a tall order. That's why the work is feeling so hard to so many people right now."

  • | The Christian Science Monitor

    “Hopefully we come out with new ideas about what engagement and motivation and building connections can look like at a distance,” says Nate Schwartz, professor of practice at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University and co-founder of EdResearch for Recovery.

  • | Boston Globe
    These results match the expectations of Susanna Loeb, the director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which conducts research and advocacy in support of urban public schools. She says students whose parents had the resources to invest in tutors or set up pods would be unlikely to suffer. “We don’t worry that all students lost,” she says. “We worry that some students lost a lot more than others did.” In other words, COVID’s most enduring educational legacy will likely be worsening inequality — of opportunity and outcome — in a country already skewed toward the haves.
  • | Education Week

    Susanna Loeb, Matthew Kraft, and John Papay are named to 2021 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings.

    The metrics recognize university-based scholars in the U.S. who are doing the most to influence educational policy and practice. The rubric reflects both a scholar's larger body of work and their impact on the public discourse last year.

    For the full list and to learn more about the rankings, visit The 2021 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings.

  • | The Minority Report - American Economic Association
    Communities of color in the United States and throughout the world are suffering because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This health crisis has not just eroded the well-being of people of color (POC); it has exacerbated and brought to the forefront the racial, health, economic, gender, and education inequalities at the foundation of American society. The visible eruption of a multiethnic, multiracial, multigenerational, and international movement led by Black activists within the context of the pandemic is not a coincidence but a deliberate, organized effort to demand social justice for the very communities where this health crisis is felt most deeply. Coronavirus is not the “great equalizer” but the great exposer of how race in this country overdetermines social, health, and economic outcomes for POC.
  • | KQED

    “We can’t expect all these schools to just reinvent the wheel for tutoring with all the coordination, curriculum, training, costs, and expertise it requires,” said Matthew Kraft, a Brown University professor who co-authored a new report calling for a national tutoring program. “We need to support them to do so.”

  • | Center on the Study of Educators
    Every year, far too many students across the country begin school without a permanent teacher in place in their classroom. These teacher vacancies arise for many reasons – schools do not complete their hiring on time, teachers resign late in the summer, and new positions arise at the last minute. Regardless of the reason, vacancies and late hiring hurt students. Students whose teachers are hired after the start of the school year learn less than those whose teachers are hired earlier.
  • | The 74

    In a working paper released this summer, University of Toronto economist Philip Oreopoulos examined evidence from nearly 100 randomized controlled trials of tutoring programs, detecting strongly positive results for academic performance in multiple subjects. Even more promising, the intervention worked — with occasionally eye-popping effect sizes — in multiple formats, even when conducted by tutors who weren’t professional educators. If paraprofessionals, trained volunteers, and even family members can deliver effective one-on-one instruction, there may be potential for the nationwide use of tutors to help students make up ground lost to COVID, as Brown professor Matt Kraft has proposed.

  • | Education Next

    The substantial learning loss wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic has spurred calls for scaling tutoring programs to catch students up, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

    What if we used this moment to make tutoring a permanent part of the public-school landscape?

    After all, tutoring is among the most effective education interventions ever studied. The average effect of tutoring programs on academic achievement is larger than roughly 85 percent of other education interventions and equivalent to moving a student at the 35th percentile of the achievement distribution to the 50th. Private tutoring services now constitute a $47 billion industry in the United States, one analysis shows. Yet access to tutoring remains inherently unequal because it is only broadly available to those who can afford it.

  • | Chalkbeat

    High school students tutoring elementary school kids. College students working with middle schoolers. A corps of recent college graduates helping high school students. And an extra 30 minutes tacked on to the school day.

    Brown University researchers say that’s how the U.S. could structure a nationwide program to help students recover from the academic disruption caused by the pandemic. Their blueprint, released Wednesday, lays out how millions of students could get access to small-group tutoring, a concept with a strong research backing.