The Indiana Department of Education is the latest to try “outcomes-based contracting” — a pay-for-performance strategy that hires companies to tackle thorny education issues and pay them largely based on how much students improve. 

Indiana’s task: Helping catch up from missing school during the pandemic.

State education secretary Katie Jenner said she and her staff looked at other states for guidance on how they solved middle school reading troubles, but found none successful enough to copy. 

But companies and non-profits contacted her all summer offering solutions after the state announced that middle school reading scores fell last year, she said.

“Not a day goes by that I’m not pinged multiple times by vendors across our country who have the next best thing since sliced bread,” Jenner told the state school board last month. 

“Put your money where your mouth is,” Jenner said. “If you are awesome and outstanding, move the needle. Help us move the needle for kids, rather than us just writing a check for millions of dollars and it still being status quo.”

Jenner’s not saying yet how the state will structure contracts — how much pay will be guaranteed and how much incentive-based — or even if the state will put out a formal request for proposals for the work. But several other states, including Texas, Florida and Arkansas, have examples and lessons on how to do it, as does the Center for Outcomes-Based Contracting created in 2024 by the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation.

“It brings clarity, aligns goals, and ideally creates real accountability across both the provider and the district,” said Mike Cohen, CEO of Cignition, a virtual tutoring company that met many of its contracted learning goals in Denver. “That said, there are definitely risks — especially when external factors like student attendance or district scheduling are out of the vendor’s control.”

He added: “If students don’t show up, it’s very hard to deliver outcomes, no matter how strong the instruction is.”

The center suggests having at least 40 percent of a contract dependent on clearly-defined student gains, though results so far have been mixed and advocates are still refining how to set goals and compensation.

The model is gaining in popularity. After backing a pilot with just four districts in 2022, the Southern Education Foundation now counts 60 districts and regional or state education agencies as testing the strategy.

Whether this model helps students learn more is unclear. Research is limited, so evidence of success remains anecdotal. Because some students usually improve and others don’t, schools typically pay per-student bonuses for a percentage of students, while vendors receive no extra pay for the remainder.

The that about half of the learning goals spelled out in member contracts in 2025 were achieved, with vendors earning about 68 percent of possible bonuses.

“As this work has started to scale, we’re starting to see that the rigor and integrity of the contracts are being maintained, and we’re seeing more and more outcomes for kids, which is the whole point of the work,” said center executive director Brittany Miller.

The idea of basing pay on performance isn’t new. Salespeople have long been paid by commissions, while executives and athletes have bonuses as big parts of their contracts. But school districts and states don’t often build contracts with outside companies around results.

That started to change right after the pandemic when some districts started hiring tutors with incentives as they used pandemic relief money. Two of those — Ector County Independent School District in Odessa,Texas, and Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida — saw many students make strong gains, while others didn’t.

Duval County is still using the approach, the district told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, and now offers 50% guaranteed pay and 50% incentive-based. 

“The approach is working well, boosting student growth in math,” said district spokesperson Sonya Duke-Bolden, with fewer 9th grade students needing math help than before.

Ector County hasn’t used the model once its pandemic tutoring contracts ended, however, and is still evaluating if it would use it again.

The Denver Public Schools are in a similar position, after Cohen’s Cignition achieved strong results and the other didn’t and was unable to collect much of the bonus pay. 

after studying eight districts that adopted the strategy as they used pandemic-relief money for high-dosage tutoring. Researchers wrote that districts and vendors worked together closely and tracked student data intensely since pay was so dependent on results. 

Vendors told researchers they appreciate a chance to showcase their curriculum, staff or online learning program, but are hesitant to embrace the contracts when results are so dependent on students actively participating and on imperfect measures of gains.

“OBC fosters collaboration, improves service alignment with student needs, and enhances data tracking,” researchers found. “However, financial risks for vendors and the complexity of implementation pose challenges.”

As with most outcomes-based contracts, Indiana’s will center on struggling students, who often have attendance and motivation problems too, so gaining results won’t be easy.

“We’re already working with a population of students that we would deem not at grade level or struggling in some capacity when it comes to their reading skills,” said Anna Shults, chief academic officer of Indiana’s education department. “These are students that have been probably given a plethora of support along their entire educational continuum, and it’s just still not working.”

Shults said the state will look to the , a part of the non-profit American Institutes for Research, or the , an arm of the U.S. Department of Education, for vendors that have promise. Districts could then choose to tap into a still-undetermined pool of state dollars to hire tutors.

Jenner is also seeking donations and grants to help cover contracts.

Even as she sorts out the details, Jenner is excited by the concept, on broader education issues. She told the committee it’s a careful way to take on the state’s reading problem.

“We will only pay if a partner helps us deliver outcomes for our students,” Jenner said. “It’s our responsibility to make sure in Indiana we are getting a return on investment.”

There are three different sources of information to answer that question. Two of them are showing students made no or small gains last year, and the third, NAEP, will come out in early 2025 and provide the final word. 

The first results were the interim benchmark assessments like NWEA’s MAP Growth and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready. Combined, they test millions of students several times a year, so think of them as the canary in the coal mine. Although they found slightly different trends across subjects and grade levels, they that students made little progress in math and may have even declined in English Language Arts. 

The interim assessments are voluntary, and they don’t break out the results by state, district or school. So the next piece of evidence comes from the tests that states administer each Spring, and those results have been slowly trickling out. Now, the team behind has organized that data, and as of the end of November, they had grade- and subject-level results for 39 states and the District of Columbia. 

The states are painting a slightly more optimistic picture than what the interim assessments showed, but just barely. For example, the median state reported a one-point increase in the percentage of 8^th graders who were proficient in math. States reported similarly small gains across grades and subjects, with the exception of 8^thgrade English Language Arts, which declined by 0.2 points. 

To put it bluntly, these small gains are not enough to get kids back up to their achievement levels prior to the pandemic. And, with ESSER funds expiring earlier this year, there’s not a lot of fuel left to help students get back on track. 

The table below shows the state-level results in 8^th grade math. Readers should take those with a grain of salt. For example, Oklahoma and reported double-digit increases, but those are largely due to leaders in those states lowering standards. 

You can also see some missing data in the table. Some states haven’t released their results by grade level, as they are required to by federal law. And as Dale Chu noted in the , 10 states are out of compliance with federal law with respect to how scores are reported, and 13 are not reporting what percentage of students actually took the tests. 

Some states have been putting up modest gains for the past few years. In 8^th grade math, for example, 10 states—Alabama, Connecticut, Kansas, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia—have all increased proficiency rates by more than 1 point a year for multiple years in a row. Other states have shown little to no progress from their pre-pandemic lows, notably Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia. 

To know for certain which of these gains are real, and which ones are artificially inflated, we’ll have to see the third set of data, the NAEP results that are scheduled to come out early next year. Given that they use one common yardstick across the country, those should provide the final verdict on these early recovery years. Judging by what we’ve seen from the first two sources, we shouldn’t hope for much more than a very slight uptick nationally. 

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman works with NWEA and the Collaborative for Student Success. 

The White House, which has faced criticism for not doing enough for students who fell dramatically behind in math and reading, had something to show for it Thursday. An estimated 323,000 college students, volunteers and school staff signed up — not only exceeding the administration’s goal, but hitting it ahead of schedule. 

“This problem is not getting solved by somebody in Washington D.C. We launched the vision. We sent out money,” Deputy Secretary of Education Cindy Marten said at an event to celebrate the milestone. But those resources, she said, “helped to galvanize” volunteers and staff at the local level. “I’m proud that we can see the results of this collective effort.”

In the 2023-24 school year, over a quarter of principals reported offering more tutoring, mentoring or other support services than they did the previous year, according to a of over a thousand school leaders released ahead of the event. In all, roughly 24,500 schools added an average of 5.5 additional adults focused on supporting students.

While it’s too early to determine what effect the extra help had on student performance, over 30% of principals said they were able to employ research-backed, high-dosage tutoring, according to from the Rand Corp. That means trained tutors worked with the same students over time for at least 90 minutes per week.

Demand for tutors has received significant national attention, given students’ steep decline in learning. But the White House count also reflects a variety of added positions, including mentors to help re-engage chronically absent students and those who help students navigate college applications. About $20 million in federal relief money, flowing through AmeriCorps, the national service organization, fueled the partnership’s work. Districts also dipped in to other COVID funding to support the extra positions.

But the initiative, led by the National Partnership for Student Success at Johns Hopkins University, faces an uncertain future. Districts are using up what’s left of that money, and Republicans want to for AmeriCorps, as they have for years.

“One hundred percent depends on the election,” said Robert Balfanz, the Johns Hopkins professor who leads the partnership. He expects the effort to continue “in some form” if Vice President Kamala Harris wins. 

It’s unclear whether Donald Trump would do the same, but the educational effects of the pandemic will linger regardless of who’s in office, he said. 

“We have kids that are disengaged. We have kids that have greater out-of-school problems. We have kids that are more confused about what they want to do after high school,” Balfanz said. “It’s very hard to address those kids with your school staff alone.” 

Launched six months after U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona issued the charge for more tutors, the initiative serves as a hub for connecting local groups and individuals to schools that need them. Some leaders from the partnership’s national network of 200 districts have tried new strategies to motivate students.

In hopes of reducing a chronic absenteeism rate of about 30%, Principal Scott Hale at Johnstown High School, north of Albany, New York, tapped existing staff members, like teaching assistants, secretaries and coaches, to serve as mentors.

“Success mentors” at the school are matched with students to better understand why they’re absent and what incentives might lure them back. Keeping track of absences on a simple paper calendar drives home how quickly they can add up, Hale said.

“Many students don’t realize how many days they have missed until they see it,” he said. Reducing schoolwide chronic absenteeism has been tough, he added. But over half of the 125 students with mentors increased their attendance. “To see a kid improve from 80 absences to 30 is a huge win for us.”

‘Must be doing the right thing’ 

College students, who saw their own educations disrupted by the pandemic, have been integral to school recovery efforts, said Josh Fryday, for California Volunteers. 

“This generation experienced COVID in high school,” Fryday said. “I think they understand how important it is to be connected and have this extra support.”

Devin Blankenship was among those who signed up for the organization’s College Corps. She was earning a degree in sociology from Vanguard University, south of Los Angeles, and wanted some nonprofit experience. To avoid commuting through Los Angeles traffic, she took a virtual tutoring position with Los Angeles-based Step Up Tutoring. 

Over the next year, she worked with a third grader from the Los Angeles Unified School District whose reading skills had been so severely impacted by school closures that he barely knew letter sounds. Before she could focus on a lesson, another student confided in Blankenship about getting bullied at school.

“Students told me they were excited to come to tutoring for that hour,” she said. “I said, ‘Wow, I must be doing the right thing.’ ” 

Blankenship’s experience also points to some of the challenges tutors have faced, especially in a district as large as Los Angeles. At times, she didn’t know where to go with questions about helping a student or working with a family. She said she had to initiate Zoom or phone calls with her supervisor for answers. 

There were also moments when she felt ill-equipped to help. She recalls watching YouTube videos on improper fractions late at night while trying to meet a midnight deadline for a college paper.

“I was like, ‘Man, I wish there were tutoring sessions for me,’ ” she said.

With interest in a career in education, she sometimes felt frustrated that she didn’t have more interaction with students’ teachers. But those limitations didn’t drive Blankenship away. She now works as a teaching assistant in a special education class at Palms Elementary School in Perris, California, east of Los Angeles. She’s part of a program that fast-tracks interns into classroom positions to help address a teaching shortage.

‘Solved the problem’ 

In addition to giving future teachers practical experience, the national effort has spawned connections between tutoring organizations and college students looking for work. 

Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, struggled while schools were closed to find community service jobs for its students. Then an official who runs its federal work-study program learned about Step Up Tutoring through a local .

Pepperdine was “really interested in partnering with Step Up because we solved the problem for them,” said Sam Olivieri, Step Up’s CEO. “We were able during COVID to fill those community service slots through a virtual program.”

Word of their partnership spread and Step Up Tutoring now draws college students from 17 institutions. Virtual tutoring options have helped universities meet Cardona’s 2023 for higher education leaders to spend 15% of their work-study funds on community service — more than double the .

Olivieri thinks that the higher commitment from colleges to helping K-12 students will be a “durable” impact of the partnership’s work. 

Rand’s data shows that despite the additional funding and personnel, a third of principals said only some of the students who needed the services received them.

“The waters are not receding,” Balfanz said at the event. “The challenge remains.”

That bothered Jacqueline Kronk, CEO of the clubs in St. Joseph County, so she leapt at a chance to add students this summer as part of statewide expansion of a promising Indianapolis effort.

Started in 2021 to help students catch up after the pandemic, the Indy Summer Learning Labs will receive more than $5 million from Indiana to expand into the Gary and South Bend areas, along with more rural Salem and Wabash. The five-week mix of academic work and fun activities for first through ninth graders has grown each year and is credited by the state with giving students strong gains in both math and English. 

The “Expanding What Works” grants let Kronk grow her program from 1,500 students last year to 2,500 in five counties around South Bend. She has also hired more teachers from local schools and upgraded the program’s curriculum.

“We’d be foolish to not address the fact that COVID and the implications of that are still here and rampant amongst our young students
and their ability to learn and thrive,” Kronk said. “We should be really, really scared about that reality and realize that we need to be throwing all but the kitchen sink at this issue.”

The nonprofit The Mind Trust and the United Way of Central Indiana created the Indy Learning Labs in 2021 for 3,000 students at 35 sites around the city, allowing students a chance to catch up on lost school time. The labs also offer field trips and other activities students in more affluent students can afford.

The labs have grown each year and The Mind Trust expects to have up to 5,500 students at 49 sites in the city â€” schools, churches, youth centers, or nonprofits â€” this summer. Though there are no income limits, nearly 90 percent of children qualify for free or reduced school lunches, a common measure of low family income, allowing the labs to reach families eight times less likely to enroll in summer programs than affluent ones.

Summer programs like the labs have been a widespread strategy for cities and school districts to catch students up after the pandemic. A found more than 70 percent of school districts have added or expanded summer programs since the pandemic, making them the most common use of federal COVID relief dollars.

Results are usually low on math and reading gains, but a new study this week found large gains last year from the Summer Boost program funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies in eight cities, including Indianapolis.

Researchers have found the small reading and math improvements in summer programs are often because programs don’t offer enough academic work.

Results from both the Bloomberg study and last summer’s Learning Labs are more promising because the programs offered more academic work — about three hours a day devoted to math and English instruction.

Bloomberg based Boost on the Indy Summer Learning Labs and sponsored the labs last summer. The study did not include any lab programs.

The Bloomberg study found 22 days of summer learning helped students make, on average, three to four weeks of reading gains and about four to five weeks in math gains.

That let students make up 22 percent of COVID losses in reading and 31 percent of math, researchers estimated.

The Learning Labs had previously released data from tests given to students at the start and end of the program. Last year, those tests showed proficiency rates in both math and English increased more than 20 percent during the program.

Organizers credit time spent on learning, hiring teachers from local schools to teach some of the sessions and using a curriculum carefully chosen to align with state learning standards for the gains.

Those results, along with the ability to add more students and upgrade the curriculum were all appealing in South Bend, Kronk said.

“The impact that we saw that it had down in Indianapolis for the last several years and for us to be able to scale and replicate that and bring that to counties that we’re serving up here
that really excited us,” she said.

Indianapolis parent Chavana Oliver said the labs were a huge help last year for her son Leanno, 7, who was about to enter first grade but has issues with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and needed extra help.

“He saw a lot of improvement,” Oliver said. She signed him up again this year, as well as her older son Kaden, 8. “ Now he’s very excited, because it will help even more for the second grade.”

Deborah Hendricks Black, a former teacher who helped the Urban League and others apply for the state grant to bring the labs to Gary, said the test score gains and reports from parents in Indianapolis like Oliver caught her eye. The grants will allow 750 students from high-poverty Gary and surrounding communities including East Chicago to avoid summer learning loss and catch up when behind.

“Now we’ll have a chance to at least affect a small amount of students,” she said. “But we know they will be supported effectively with a proven curriculum that provides gains in a short amount of time and we’re looking forward to that.”

Cassandra Summers-Corp, executive director of the Creating Avenues for Student Transformation (CAST) nonprofit in Salem said her rural area about 100 miles south of Indianapolis has a lack of tutors to help students who have fallen behind. Her organization has offered summer programs focused on reading lessons to about 40 students in surrounding counties the last few years. The new grant will let her add math classes and grow to 75 students, along with increasing from three days a week to five.

“We really wanted a partner to help us to expand,” Summers said. “Even though a lot of COVID learning loss money is sunsetting, we know that the crisis of COVID learning loss is not over.”

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Almost three-fourths of and nearly two-thirds of Ohio fourth graders were not proficient in reading in 2022, according to a new study.

Seventy-one percent of Ohio eighth graders were not proficient in math — a number that has only gotten worse over time, according to the latest Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Book. Back in 2019, 62% of Ohio eighth graders were not proficient in math.

“It’s super important to reach those benchmarks because it’s what’s at least been shown to be where we want our students to be that helps set them up to be successful in later grades and later in life,” said Matthew Tippit, policy associate at Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio.

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Ohio fared slightly better than the rest of the country — 74% of American eighth graders were not proficient in math, according to the report.

Sixty-five percent of Ohio fourth graders were not proficient in reading in 2022, a percent point worse when compared to 2019. Nationally, 68% of fourth graders were not proficient in reading.

Ohio public schools are preparing to implement the science of reading which of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

The state’s two-year budget, which was signed into law last year, included .

A little more than half (57%) of Ohioans three and four-year-olds were not in school during 2018-2022, according to the report.

Thirty percent of all students nationally (14.7 million) were chronically absent from school, which typically means missing at least 10% of school days in a year.

“The COVID-19 pandemic wrought serious academic damage as it closed schools and separated students from their physical learning environment,” Annie E. Casey Foundation President and CEO Lisa Hamilton said in the report. “Unprecedented drops in fourth grade reading and eighth grade math proficiency among students in the United States between 2019 and 2022 amounted to decades of lost progress.”

The stakes for catching up on the COVID-19 learning loss are high. Up to is dependent on addressing unfinished pandemic-era backsliding, according to a February report from the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank at Stanford University.

Students who don’t go , according to a 2013 report published in the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s Economic Commentary.

Overall, Ohio ranked 28th in the nation based on 16 indicators and ranked 18th in the education category.

Poverty

Almost half a million Ohio children were living in poverty in 2022, according to the report. The 446,000 children living in poverty made up 18% of Ohio’s kids. 10% of Ohio children representing 264,000 kids lived in high-poverty areas in 2022.

Sixteen percent of American children totaling 11,583,000 kids were living in poverty in 2022, according to the study.

“That’s so concerning to me just because of what we know that living in poverty can do to all other factors of life,” Tippit said. “We know that health indicators tend to be lower. We know that education outcomes are worse. We know that long term, you’re more likely to stay at that level of income as your family.”

About 40% of Ohio children have experienced one or more adverse childhood experience such as family economic hardships, their parents being divorced or a parent spending time in jail, according to the report.

would create the 26-member Adverse Childhood Experiences Study Commission which would recommend legislative strategies to the General Assembly.

State Reps. Rachel B. Baker, D-Cincinnati, and Sara Carruthers, R-Hamilton, introduced the bipartisan bill which passed last month in the House.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

At the height of the pandemic, in spring 2020, Maria O. her husband and four children were quarantined in their one-bedroom apartment in South Los Angeles, each vying for privacy, quiet and adequate technology to work and attend school remotely.

There weren’t enough tablets or laptops, and Wi-Fi was glitchy. Her children ended up logging into online classes using their parents’ phones. While the children once loved school, they started falling behind academically. Everyone grew frustrated. 

“People on the outside don’t know the impact that remote learning had on families like us,” said Maria O.  “It was hard and it was stressful. We stayed afloat, but it wasn’t easy.”

Maria O.’s family is among a dozen Californians who  against the state, claiming that in many schools, remote learning was so inconsistent and ineffective that thousands of students — especially low-income, Black and Latino students — were denied their right to an education. She and other plaintiffs in the case were not identified by their full names in court documents and asked to remain anonymous when interviewed in order to protect their children’s privacy.

The  this month in Alameda County Superior Court, which issued an order that the state introduce legislation requiring schools to spend the remaining $2 billion in COVID relief funds to help students who were most impacted by remote learning recover academically and emotionally from the pandemic. That could include tutoring, counseling, after-school activities and other steps.

The impact of school shutdowns

But beyond the settlement details, the case has drawn attention to the magnitude of learning loss during the pandemic. Despite herculean efforts by school staff to keep students engaged during remote classes, learning loss — especially among students who were struggling before the pandemic — is a crisis that could harm a generation of students, researchers said.

“We can measure the impact of lost quality instruction, but the implications of a traumatic few academic years are much bigger for student health, mental health and well-being,” said Joe Bishop, co-founder of UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools. “In the same way we rush to support families after a wildfire or school shooting, we have to deploy assistance to help students, especially youth of color, with the same sense of urgency.”

Bishop and his team at UCLA on learning loss on behalf of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. They interviewed teachers, administrators, counselors and school staff at all levels. They found that remote learning exacerbated pre-existing inequities and that most educators believe the state offered insufficient guidance on how to navigate the pandemic.

But with California’s decentralized education system, the state’s authority was limited, said Elizabeth Sanders, a spokesperson for the California Department of Education. Still, the department provided ample assistance for schools under difficult circumstances, she said.

“Certainly, there were clear needs for support that students and families had during the pandemic. (The Department of Education) and Superintendent (Tony) Thurmond acted immediately to try to meet those needs,” Sanders said. “And when new needs arose, we stepped in to provide help every step of the way.”

For example, when some districts struggled to get laptops or tablets for every student, the state leveraged its connections to manufacturers to deliver enough devices to districts, even amid a global shortage, she said. In addition, the state provided a host of online resources for schools, addressing ,Ìę,Ìę campuses,Ìę and other topics. 

Nonetheless, too many districts were “flying in dangerous conditions without a control tower, or central place of support,” Bishop said. “They were largely left alone to weather the COVID storm.” 

While some districts fared relatively well during remote learning, others struggled to meet students’ basic needs. That included everything from providing enough devices and Wi-Fi hotspots, to addressing students’ mental health needs, to offering adequate academic instruction.

“Schools and districts felt isolated and on their own dealing with this extraordinary moment in our history,” Bishop said. “They had to be public health experts, help parents find jobs and housing, provide IT support.”

The UCLA researchers also looked at solutions to a problem they say stretches far beyond the realm of schools. They said the Department of Education needs support from the Legislature and other agencies to create a long-term roadmap for recovery. It should include a comprehensive plan to address staffing shortages, expand mental health services and target services to students who need them the most, among other steps.

“Right now there’s not a clear compass for where we’re headed and what we’re doing about it,” Bishop said. “Learning has been stagnant, but as a state, what are we doing about it? This is a question we need to answer.”

Parents’ frustrations

Kelly R., another plaintiff in the lawsuit, said she’s hopeful the settlement funds will help students across California regain lost ground. 

During remote learning, her three daughters, who were enrolled in Los Angeles Unified, experienced shortened school days and large amounts of independent work they struggled to complete. Kelly R., a case manager, was working from home, and because the family lived in an airplane path, Wi-Fi was unreliable.  

Her children were falling behind academically, lost their self confidence and started disliking school, she said. This was especially frustrating, she said, because just a few miles away in more affluent neighborhoods, students were attending in-person learning pods paid for by their parents, and staying on top of their academics.

“It was stressful, discouraging. I had a sense of helplessness. I kept asking myself, what could I have done better?” she said. “Maybe if we had been in a different tax bracket, things would have gone differently.”

Compton Unified rebounds

Compton Unified, in Los Angeles County, has rebounded almost entirely from the pandemic, according to the . Last year, English language arts scores actually surpassed the 2019 results, while math scores jumped 5.8% to nearly meet the pre-pandemic score. The graduation rate was 89% last year, two percentage points higher than in 2019. Chronic absenteeism was still high last year, but it was lower than the state average of 24%.

Superintendent Darin Brawley credits a heavy investment in tutoring and mental health services, some of which pre-date the pandemic. The district used its COVID relief funds to contract with four tutoring agencies and expand mental health curriculum at all schools, for families as well as students. It also operates 30 on-campus wellness centers that offer services such as mental health counseling, yoga and mindfulness and crisis intervention.

Brawley also credits an early reopening plan. Some students, including English learners and those in special education, began returning to in-person school in October 2020, months before most other schools reopened.

“Because of that, our students have done a little better. The drops were not as significant,” Brawley said. “Although we’re not where I want us to be.”

Brawley said he’s heartened by the settlement, but its success will depend on whether the money actually benefits students who were most affected by remote learning. Accountability and follow-up will be key, he said.

“This case is extremely important. You cannot deny that Black and brown and low-income students were significantly impacted by the pandemic,” Brawley said. “But the devil will be in the details.”

California’s education landscape, in context

California’s learning loss was not the worst in the country, by a long shot. California is actually in the middle of the pack nationwide,  from the Stanford Graduate School of Education released last month. California schools have seen less dramatic recovery than other states, but the initial loss wasn’t as great.

Nationwide, the recovery for some districts has been remarkable, said Sean Reardon, co-author of the study and a Stanford University education professor. While some districts, especially those in low-income areas, are still behind, some have made significant strides to catch up. Overall, students have rebounded by 25% in reading and 33% in math, far exceeding students’ typical progress in a year, according to the report. 

He said teachers deserve credit for those improvements, helping students stay on track academically while addressing a host of other demands.

“The question is, will the recovery be sustained as (COVID relief) funds run out this year,” Reardon said. “We also need to look at the strategy going forward.”

For Maria O., who works as a case manager, the effects from the pandemic still linger. Her children managed to stay afloat, thanks in part to tutoring and other support from Community Coalition, a South Los Angeles nonprofit that focuses on social justice. But they’re not as enthusiastic about school as they once were.

Her son, who’s in high school, is especially disengaged, she said. Although he’s doing OK  academically, he often wants to skip class, she said, and she worries about him.

“I didn’t take part in this lawsuit for my kids, though. I did it for the kids who don’t have the support that my kids do,” she said. “I want to give them a voice.” 

This story was originally published on CalMatters.

But there they were, being shifted back to a digital setting. 

The district said it could not staff in-person programs, but parents and advocates from local nonprofits clapped back angrily, noting that other Minnesota districts — and a dozen other Minneapolis summer programs — were fully staffed. Federal and state laws prohibit both making unilateral changes to special education services and relying on parents to supervise instruction, they noted in a letter to district leaders.      

The letter also charged that the decision discriminated against a category of students who require the most support — overwhelmingly children of color — and blasted school leaders for rejecting options suggested by the families.

“In the few hours since we received this letter, we have already been able to brainstorm better alternatives to what was proposed,” wrote a number of parents and advocates, including two groups representing the autism community. “Letters like the one families received from the district are indicative of the reason trust between students, families and the district is at an all-time low and the reason many families are choosing to leave the district.” 

“The Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act entitles our children to a Free and Appropriate Public Education,” they added. “We believe there is nothing appropriate about using a mechanism to deliver services that already failed our children once before, and there is nothing free about delivery models that require parents and caregivers to provide the services that are supposed to be provided by paid professionals.”

Disability advocates say the parents are right — but are also likely stuck. Lodging complaints, particularly grievances alleging systemic violations, requires resources most don’t have. Even if they could afford a lawyer, there is just one with the requisite expertise taking cases in Minnesota. And as families scrambled to find care on a few days’ notice for children they thought would be in school, most were overwhelmed.

Âé¶čŸ«Æ· asked to interview Minneapolis district leaders about the parents’ and advocates’ concerns — including their belief that the shift was illegal. A spokesperson responded with a written statement similar to the one sent to families, saying the district could not hire enough licensed special education teachers and had moved approximately 450 students to online learning.

The district “is proactively addressing this issue through a residency program with the University of St. Thomas and developing an internal paid teacher preparation program,” the statement says. “The fruits of those labors, however, are in the future.”

Advocates for the families also point out that at the same time school leaders were planning the summer’s programs, district officials — including the administrator overseeing special education — were bargaining new union contracts with the teachers and aides needed to staff in-person classes. Just as they agreed to provisions making up the weeks schools were closed by a strike, negotiators could have included extended special education services in their talks, the advocates say.      

and disability attorneys say a lack of staff or facilities is not an excuse for failing to provide special education services. And neighboring school districts of comparable size, including St. Paul Public Schools and the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan Independent School District, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· their in-person summer programs for children with disabilities were fully staffed. St. Paul was able to hire some 50 extra special educators through an agency that provides substitute teachers. Rosemount dramatically increased pay.

Hundreds of individual plans, one blanket shift 

Anticipating increased demand for services as schools reopened after pandemic closures, Minnesota enacted a law requiring schools to meet last fall with the families of every special education student to create a “recovery” plan ensuring that, going forward, they’d get the therapies and tailored instruction they missed. 

The plans were supposed to take as their starting point each child’s individual needs, with districts — which have federal funds earmarked for special education recovery services — paying for private therapists, camps and tutors if schools couldn’t provide each service. The parents and advocates who signed the letter to the district say Minneapolis families were repeatedly denied the option of finding their own services and were told their children would get summer classes instead.  

But instead of determining which students could learn in a remote setting and which needed in-person services, the families say, the district discriminated against a group of children who already spend the majority of their time in segregated classrooms by moving them online en masse. 

Referred to not by their disability but by the classification they are given on the spreadsheets states and districts use to track special education, Federal Setting III students spend 60% or more of their day away from their nondisabled peers. Almost 1,000 of Minneapolis’ nearly 4,600 special education students fall into this category — a rate that disability advocates have long criticized. Only 16% are white, compared with 38% of the student body as a whole. On state assessments administered in spring 2021, 19% of the district’s special education students could read at grade level, while just 16% were on track in math. 

Minnesota families have several alternatives when their children’s special education or disability rights have been violated. They can complain to the state Department of Education if a student has been wrongly denied services or to the Department of Human Rights if they have experienced discrimination. The federal Justice and Education departments can also intervene, and the nonprofit PACER Center can help parents advocate for their children. 

Yet, to date, Twin Cities disability advocates say no family has been willing to take on the task of filing a formal complaint. Minnesota’s Multicultural Autism Action Network, which was founded by Somali parents of autistic children, started getting anguished calls from families immediately after the district’s letter went out. Many have been overwhelmed trying to figure out child care, but they are also confused and scared, says Executive Director Maren Christenson. 

“If you are a family for whom English is not your first language, if you’re a family that’s not terribly comfortable confronting authority figures, if your preferred method of communication is oral, rather than written, then none of these [complaint] processes are very accessible to you,” she says. “We’ve also heard from a lot of families that are upset about this decision and angry, but are very fearful of retaliation.”

‘The virtual basement’

Since the early months of the pandemic, civil rights activists nationwide have been watching and worrying, anticipating the advent of what the staff of the nonprofit Center for Learner Equity calls “the virtual basement” — the distance-learning analogue to the windowless, subterranean classrooms where children with disabilities often are segregated. 

It’s a grim quip — but one rooted in the decades advocates have spent pushing back against school systems’ resistance to educating children with disabilities alongside their non-disabled peers. Indeed, virtual learning’s potential to segregate is so strong that both pandemic-era U.S. education secretaries specifically warned schools about excluding special education students from in-person classrooms. 

The Minneapolis situation “is exactly the sort of thing that many of us in the disability community are concerned about,” says Wendy Tucker, an attorney and the center’s senior director of policy. “Basically, what you’re doing is handing off the responsibility to a family member on the other side of the computer. I have real concerns about the legality of that.”

Tucker also says it should alarm state and federal civil rights officials that more than 80% of the students affected are nonwhite.

When Congress drafted the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act in 1973, it took pains to stop the practice of warehousing children with disabilities in the cheapest possible manner. To that end, the law’s twin cornerstones are clauses that require schools to provide students with a “free and appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive setting.” 

The goal is to ensure that to the greatest extent possible, students receive special education services alongside their non-disabled peers. To protect that right, schools can’t change any student’s placement without first holding what’s known as an IEP meeting, at which teachers and parents hopefully come to agreement on any substantive change to the child’s Individualized Educational Program — the document that lays out how those needs will be met. 

The plans define the placement not necessarily as a physical space, but as the number of minutes each day the child spends segregated from their nondisabled classmates. Pre-pandemic, civil rights officials considered virtual learning one of the most restrictive settings.

Within days of the nation’s first COVID school shutdowns, district administrators, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and congressional leaders from both parties began a contentious debate over how much flexibility educators should have in complying with federal special education law. DeVos ultimately sided with disability rights leaders. 

In Minneapolis, all elementary pupils were in remote schooling until February 2021, with older students returning later. Schools were closed for five weeks during the 2021-22 academic year by a surge of COVID’s Omicron variant and a three-week teacher strike. At the end of the walkout, district officials released a statement saying families with concerns about interruptions to special education should ask their child’s teacher about summer programs.

The different processes for addressing a child’s lack of progress or a school’s failure to provide a required service are cumbersome, expensive and frequently antagonistic. Anticipating the bureaucratic nightmare teachers and parents would face trying to use the typical procedures to address months of missed services, Minnesota passed a law in June 2021 creating a less cumbersome process for providing what are now called recovery services. 

The law required schools to hold an extra IEP meeting at the start of the 2021-22 school year specifically to evaluate each student’s needs. Whether delivered by school staff or outside providers, services were to continue until parents and teachers agreed the child has made sufficient progress not to need them. 

Christenson is one of the advocates who helped craft the new law. The parents in her network don’t agree that the district had no choice but to move their children to online learning. 

“I personally sat in on a number of IEP meetings where families specifically asked the district to allow them to use third parties as part of their recovery education package 
 a private occupational therapist or private speech pathologist in order to make up what they lost during the pandemic,” she says. “The district, in every meeting I was part of, said, ‘No, we’re not going to do that.’

“If they knew they weren’t going to be able to provide this, then why didn’t they at least say yes to the families who said, ‘Hey, I’ve got somebody over here who can do this service’?”

‘The notice 
 does not meet the obligations of the law’

The law may be on the students’ side, but enforcing it isn’t easy, in part because attorneys have a hard time getting paid. Unless a family has possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on a lawsuit, they must persuade an attorney to take their case for free in hopes of first winning and later persuading a judge to order the losing school district to pay the plaintiff’s legal fees.

One of Minnesota’s two lawyers with expertise in special education charges $400 an hour. The other, Andrea Jepson, practiced for several years but, unable to earn enough to pay her student debt, began teaching at a law school in the hope of encouraging more attorneys to learn about students’ rights.

After Minneapolis officials canceled in-person services for Level III students, Jepson participated in an to talk the affected parents through their options. “The notice that you received does not meet the obligations of the law,” she said. “It does not explain what your rights are or how you might appeal.” Jepson described eight ways families could push back against the decision, but each one was greeted with silence.

Finally, she pointed out that the district failed to take the need to provide recovery services into account during its March contract talks with striking teachers and classroom aides: “The strike — that would have been a very appropriate time to negotiate what needed to happen for summer staffing.” 

Rachel Pearson is a senior parent advocate at the PACER Center, an organization that provides a wide range of services for people with disabilities, including education about enforcing their rights. While declining to discuss Minneapolis Public School specifically, she says her colleagues are able to help families file complaints. 

But parents shouldn’t overlook one of the simplest tools at their disposal, she says. If a family disagrees with a school’s proposal to change a student’s placement — or, for that matter, a district’s decision to deny a request — federal law says they can ask for something called a Prior Written Notice. In this notice, the school must justify its stance and inform parents they have 14 days to object. Sending an email asking for a Prior Written Notice should force the school back into the conversation, Pearson says. 

Tucker agrees, but says a broader solution is also needed. The absence of a vigorous response to the pandemic’s continued fallout, she says, is the first step down into the virtual basement. 

“Is this the way you put kids with disabilities out of the general education environment?” she asks. “Legally, the answer is no. But unless somebody pushes back, districts are going to be able to do it, and that’s concerning.”

Analyzing data from 3 million students assigned lessons through a widely used literacy program, the nonprofits ReadWorks and TNTP found that during the 2020-21 school year — the first full year after the start of the pandemic — students were assigned work below their grade level a third of the time. Children in high-poverty schools were given less challenging materials more often than their affluent peers — even when they had already mastered grade-level assignments.

“Our analysis reveals a stark disconnect between the extent of students’ unfinished learning during the pandemic and the opportunities they’re getting to engage with the grade-level work they need to catch up,” states . “It suggests that while many school systems are talking about learning acceleration, far fewer have implemented a successful learning acceleration strategy.” 

Formerly known as The New Teacher Project, TNTP focuses on improving instruction. ReadWorks provides free digital literacy materials. 

The report adds to a body of research that predates COVID. In 2018, that overall, students spend some 500 hours a year — the equivalent of six months — doing work below their grade level. Teachers are often trained to provide materials that align with what they perceive to be students’ level of mastery in the hope that success will bolster their confidence. 

But in practice, instead of giving students a firmer academic footing, assigning earlier-grade material holds them back, the group reported. More worrisome, what is often referred to as remediation is not very effective at catching kids up and has a compounding effect as years go by with no exposure to challenging work.

The report comes on the heels of by Zearn Math, which recently released data covering 600,000 students in the first two years of pandemic-era schooling. Students taught with acceleration strategies completed twice as many grade-level lessons and struggled 17% less than when they were remediated, Zearn’s team found. Black, Latino and low-income students were more likely to be remediated in math — even when they had already mastered grade-level work. 

Last year, TNTP released research showing that acceleration using grade-level material is the best way to help students catch up in math — a case also made by Zearn and the assessment concern NWEA. The authors of the new report, which may be the first about acceleration in English language arts, say they hope the ReadWorks data will embolden teachers to assign work they anticipate students will struggle with. 

“The issue with not reading at grade level is that students get behind,” says Susanne Nobles, ReadWorks’ chief academic officer. “They’re not exposed to [grade-level] vocabulary and sentence structure.”

Now, she says, “we have this data to show it’ll be okay if you give students this grade-level material.” 

The analysis examined 75,000 schools serving 12 million children in all grades, focusing on students in classes of at least 10 who attempted ReadWorks assignments 10 times or more in the 2018-19 through 2020-21 school years.

The new report found that far from adopting acceleration, teachers gave students 5 percentage points more below-grade-level material than before the start of the pandemic. Children in high-poverty schools spent about 36% of their time on less challenging materials, compared with 23% in the most affluent schools. About a quarter of students, predominantly low-income children of color, were given below-grade-level work for the entire school year.

“In those schools, when students correctly answered more than 90% of the questions on their previous month’s grade-level assignments, almost 25% of their assignments were still below grade level the next month,” the report notes. “In fact, these students received less grade-level work than students in more affluent schools who consistently struggled with grade-level assignments. There seems to be nothing many students in high-poverty schools can do to break free of negative assumptions about their abilities and ‘earn’ access to the grade-level work they need to be successful.” 

Indeed, pupils in ReadWorks’ sample were just as successful on grade-level work as they were on remedial content, answering nearly two-thirds of questions correctly regardless of the difficulty of the assignment. 

“This builds on our findings in our past research that assigning students work below their grade level mainly just denies them important opportunities to engage with material they could master if given the chance,” the researchers state. 

The report contains one important caveat. Students missing the foundational reading skills to understand phonics and turn printed words into sounds will need different learning acceleration that prioritizes those elements. 

TNTP also has produced with advice for teachers on putting the strategy into practice and for school system leaders hoping to make sure their COVID recovery efforts and relief funds support it. 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to TNTP, ReadWorks, Zearn and Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to TNTP and Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.