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May 3, 2024Is Murphy’s Education Department Giving Up On Kids Who Can’t Read?
This was originally published by the Star-Ledger Editorial Board.
The money is running out for one of the only successful tools we have to fight learning loss: High-impact tutoring. There isn’t more in the governor’s latest budget, and the truth is, kids are not nearly caught up yet.
The test scores in districts like Newark are horrifying: More than 80 percent of third graders can’t read on grade level. At Hawkins Street School, just one out of 64 third graders passed the state reading exam last Spring. And that’s not the only school where just one or two kids are passing.
Shutting down tutoring now would be crazy – in a time when kids have fallen behind so drastically, we need it more than ever. The state and local districts need to get together and save these programs. And we need some rational assessment of what works best by the state Department of Education, so districts don’t just fritter this money away.
So far, the Murphy administration has put more than $52 million into high impact tutoring, a good first step. But most of it came from federal relief funds that expire by September, so this school year could be the last for these programs if the state and districts don’t step up.
The state’s program didn’t even get started in many districts until a few months ago, four years into the pandemic. “I’m concerned that we’re going to, unfortunately, have some grades that are never going to get back what they lost as a result of this,” Senate Education Chair Vin Gopal says. “Because the state did not act quickly enough. Which they should have.”
He’s vowed to work hard to reinstate this funding and continue it, long-term. “We’re not talking about an enormous amount of money in a multi-billion-dollar budget,” Gopal told us. “If we are not making movement, I absolutely would do a hearing in Senate education.”
We also need to gather evidence on effective practices and scale them up statewide. To get these grants, districts were required to choose from an approved list of vendors and use programs shown to be effective – which are usually held during school hours, in small groups, at least twice a week with the same instructor.
But other districts just went ahead and created their own tutoring programs, outside of these parameters. While the state did issue some guidance on best practices, it never followed through with a robust plan to ensure districts actually used the best approaches. It just threw money up in the air and hoped for the best.
As a result, districts rushed to hire tutors and sign contracts, and many failed to record which programs helped students the most. Now, going forward, the DOE needs to provide some solid, hard analysis for districts that continue with tutoring to ensure they’re all using the best approaches.
We’ve already seen promising success, here and there. The New Jersey Tutoring Corps, which got $1.5 million in last year’s budget, reports impressive results across the state, for example. The percentage of third graders performing at or above grade level in math more than doubled from 19% to 42% during the course of its tutoring program in the 2022-23 school year. In reading, these kids went from 46% to 64% proficient.
Clearly, this could make a world of difference in districts like Newark. The DOE should encourage them to double down on tutoring and point them to the more effective models like this one, which is now being used in more than two dozen districts. And it’s not only poor districts that need the help. The average New Jersey student lost three quarters of a year’s learning in math and two fifths of a year in reading.
Some wealthier districts like Edison and West-Windsor Plainsboro lost even more learning in math: More than a full grade level – as much as Newark, Paterson and New Brunswick did. The $1.5 million that New Jersey Tutoring Corps got in the last budget to provide summer tutoring to about 1500 students is nothing compared to what some districts are spending on far more frivolous things.
Newark was planning to invest $4 million to build a museum, for instance, even as third graders can’t read. So cost is no excuse when it comes to quality tutoring: Make this a priority, before it’s too late.
2 Comments
It is utterly shameful that it took our legislators over 4 years to come up with a program to tackle learning loss due to school closures during the pandemic. Everyone of the legislators, including Mr. Gopal, had to be well informed of the ramifications of keeping New Jersey school closed unnecessarily too long. New Jersey’s recently released independent COVID report speaks volumes to that poor decision. The science was there. It took one day to close the schools due to the pandemic. I’m not debating the merit of that decision. But, it took almost 1,500 days to come up with high-impact tutoring grants. And if your school does not have a grant writer-Oh well!
New Jersey’s academic inequalities and learning gaps keep growing, yet we want to applaud ourselves for being “Best in the Nation” when it comes to education. We fight every opportunity for students in failing districts to succeed. Charter schools have been demonized, school choice and vouchers ridiculed, and classroom support for our teachers, to include effective discipline policies, placed on the back burner because they are just too difficult for an administration to tackle. Furthermore, New Jersey has won the prestigious title of being the sixth most segregated school system in the nation.
So, we either figure out how to educate all New Jersey students to their full potential and individual willingness or we continue to point fingers and make up excuses for our failures and when our backs are up against the wall , create a short term task force!
The state’s programs didn’t even get started until a few months ago, four years into the pandemic, in some districts.
“I’m concerned that we’re going to, unfortunately, have some grades that are never going to get back what they lost as a result of this.” A tragic admission. Tell that to your child if you are on the receiving end of that explanation. It may be a truthful statement, but it also exposes the unacceptable dereliction of duty of our legislators. New Jersey was given 3 Billion dollars from the American Rescue Plan, so lack of funds was never the issue.