 It is our honor as a cooperative effort between AASA, the Association of School Superintendents and LPI to welcome all of you to the second of five in a webinar series on accelerated learning. I was a school superintendent of 25 years and I have my hats off to everybody out there whether it's a teacher or student, a parent, a bus driver, all of you out there who have been part of this learning journey over the past couple of months, this past year. Thank you for your work on behalf of children across America. As we look towards this spring and we look towards this summer and we look towards this fall and beyond, one of the major questions I'm sure that you're facing as well as we here at AASA and LPI is the question about how do we accelerate learning for students? How do we assure that children achieve at the highest possible levels as they navigate the issues that have been confronting all of them, whether it's the social and emotional well-being, the trauma, or other issues that they are confronting? We all know that students are not just about math and science but are so much more than that and so is what we do as educators and as parents and community members on behalf of those children. Linda Darlan-Kimman in our first webinar raised the question that I think is just a key guide point for all of us to think about is that social and emotional learning is not a distraction from learning but in fact, it's a pathway to improve all that we do with cognition and academic learning. So that key point leads us to this question of setting the stage and the tone. We're trying to take the position and encourage you to join us in not talking about learning loss but talking about during this webinar series and beyond, trying to reframe the question in a narrative from a deficit-based to an asset-based and to focus on acceleration of learning instead of loss of learning. How do we take children from where they are and move them ahead as quickly as possible throughout their learning and their experiences in education? So we encourage you to be part of our conversation. Join on social media using the hashtag accelerate, not remediate. Please know this is the second of a five-part series of webinars. The first is focused on summer learning and the remaining three will focus on expanded learning, time, assessment, and centering on equity. If you missed the first session, you could watch the recording online and we're going to put into the chat. There it is. You can see the chat listing the link to the first and to all the follow-up sessions. Our next session is on May 4th and then following June 1st and May 4th, we'll be talking about accelerated learning best practices for expanded learning time. On May 18th, accelerated learning using assessment to determine student needs. And on June 1st, accelerated learning equity-centered strategies to support students. My name is Moore Sherman. I'm an Associate Executive Director at the Leadership Network and it's my pleasure, to be here today. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to ask your moderator for today's discussion. A few housekeeping issues and I'm looking at my notes to make sure I don't miss anything. Everybody except our presenters have been muted, so we'll take questions throughout the chat. Some of you are already using it. Thank you for doing that. If you have any questions at any point during the session today, make sure you have your speakers turned on and turned up so you can hear us. I'd like to let you know the audience at this webinar is being recorded for future use and the video recording of this session will be mailed to you in a few days. The slides are currently available at the link that's in the chat box. Today we'll be sharing some thoughts about tutoring. Here are our panelists, remarkable people, some of the most renowned educators in the country. We have a renowned educational economist, an award-winning superintendent, the co-founder of one of the most effective high school tutoring programs ever evaluated and a national expert in school finance. This webinar we expect will provide useful context on how districts can design, implement, and fund tutoring programs. Dr. Susanna Lava, love of the Annaberg Institute of Brown University will set us off today with an overview of the evidence based for high quality tutoring programs, and we'll follow that with Dr. Joe Baker, who is a superintendent of Long Beach Unified School District has had a long and very successful program of successful tutoring that employee certified teachers including Reading Recovery. AJ Gutierrez will successfully will discuss successful practices for high school tutoring based on his experience as a former tutor and as a co-founder of Saga Education and LPI senior researcher and policy analyst Michelle Griffith will conclude our panelist discussion today with how districts can use new funding streams to pay for high quality tutoring. So from the great theory and research to the real practical issues, how do we pay for all these important initiatives we want to do on behalf of students. We'll end today with a discussion with our presenters based upon the questions you put in your chat. We will be monitoring those so please make sure you put those questions in to help guide our panelists and their discussions at the end of the day. And so now it is my pleasure to introduce our first panelist. Dr. Susanna Lava's research focuses broadly on education policy in its role in improving educational opportunities for students. She's the founder and acting executive director of the National Superintendent Support Accelerator. Before moving to Brown University, Susanna was the Barnett family professor of education at Stanford University. She was the founding director of the Center for Educational Policy at Stanford and co-director of the Policy Analysis for California Education. In 2020, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds a PhD in economics and MPP in public policy from the University of Michigan and a BA in political science and a BS in civil engineering from Stanford University. Susanna, thank you so much for joining us today and being part of this evidence-based discussion about high quality tutoring. You know, in our first discussion, Linda Dollingham had set the stage, I think beautifully for you to kick off today's discussion where Linda talked about that the best way to begin this discussion is to focus on relationships and tutoring. So if you get those two things right, then you'll be serving children well. So it is just so exciting to have you follow up Linda's conversation from our first webinar. Thank you for joining us. Hello and thank you so much for having me here today and that's just what I'd love to talk about because of the close relationship between those, between tutoring and the adult student relationship that tutoring can develop. I'm excited to share with you what we've been learning about tutoring. Next, as we all know the pandemic, next slide please. As we all know, the pandemic has impacted students and has had a particularly severe impact on low income students and students of color. Though this data is a bit old, as you can see in the graphs, schools with the majority of white students, the blue dots, lost ground during the pandemic with students learning only about 90% as much as students did in previous years in reading and 60% in math. But for those in schools serving a majority of students of color, the learning reductions were far worse. Students in these schools learned only about 77% of what they had in previous years in reading and far less in math, adding to already substantial learning differences. So what can we do? Next slide please. Well, we know from research that tutoring is an unusually effective approach for accelerating student learning. In fact, it's more effective than almost any other intervention that's been tested. Its effectiveness in many ways is not surprising given that tutoring can target the specific needs of each student and tutoring from a consistent tutor can help develop those close adult student relationships and improve students engagement in school and their overall well-being. In fact, tutoring is often the intervention of choice for those who can afford it. About $42 billion were spent on tutoring in the U.S. last year alone, benefiting many students, but certainly increasing inequalities in access to educational opportunities. Next. However, as we know, tutoring can be really effective, but people define tutoring in many ways and not all approaches are effective. In fact, during the no child left behind era, parents whose children were in schools failing to meet adequate yearly progress for two or more years were able to sign their children up for tutoring outside of school. This may sound to some like a good idea, but it was not particularly effective overall. Only about 23% of the eligible students participated and for those students, the average impact was close to zero. However, tutoring demonstrated some positive outcomes even during the NCLB times, and those effects tended to be in places with minimum dosage requirements, more structured tutoring sessions, and stronger coordination with schools. Not all tutoring is effective, but evidence does point to several critical elements for effective tutoring, what we're calling high impact tutoring. Next, please. There's an impressively large body of evidence that supports the effectiveness of specific models of tutoring, and AJ will talk about some of that today. From these models that are effective, we can see common elements for high impact. Based on the research and many conversations with educators and other leaders in the field, we've synthesized these critical elements into a framework for high impact tutoring. In particular, seven elements are critical, which you can see here. The first three are foundational elements of equity, safety, and cohesion, and they support four model-specific elements related to the tutor, to instruction, to learning integration, and to data use. And I just want to go over these a little bit with a little bit of detail. Next slide. Three elements are essential to the foundation for any high impact tutoring program. First, the program must be grounded in equity. This means ensuring students who need it the most have access to it, and it means that tutors lead sessions with equity at the center of their instruction. In addition, high impact tutoring programs ensure the safety of students, and all their elements and leaderships work together to create a cohesive, well-run program. Equity, safety, and cohesion are fundamental to strong programs. Now let's turn to model-specific elements. The first one, which you can see in the slide, is the tutor. A wide range of people can become high-impact tutors, while teachers have proven to be particularly effective tutors. Paraprofessionals and others can also be really effective tutors. Good programs place a high priority on developing a strong tutor-student relationship, which requires having a consistent tutor who not only has command of the appropriate content knowledge, but just as importantly is skilled at engaging students and developing positive relationships. Effective programs provide oversight and coaching for tutors so that they can know how their tutors are doing and support their tutors to improve. The second model-specific element is instruction. High-impact tutoring requires special attention to both the amount of instruction and the instructional materials used. Students need to see their tutors at least three times per week for at least a semester and better yet a full school year. Instructional minutes per session can vary by grade and level and still be effective. Often programs for younger students are about 30 minutes, but for older students, older students can benefit from somewhat longer sessions of 45 minutes to an hour. The quality of instruction is of course also important, not just the quantity. Certified and experienced teachers can often provide high-quality instruction without additional supports, but most tutors need quality instructional materials. In the best-case scenario, the school is already using high-quality materials that the tutors can use and build off of. However, if the school's curricular materials are not particularly strong or the school doesn't have time to fully engage with tutors, a high-impact tutoring program will supplement the classroom materials with other high-quality materials that are aligned to state standards. The third model-specific element, they're just four, of high-impact tutoring is integration. How a program is integrated into a student's existing learning can also drive impact. Programs that are embedded in the school day or are directly before or after school are particularly effective. Primarily this integration with schools is important because these programs have higher attendance. And importantly for equity, they're able to reach the students who need tutoring the most. Embedding tutoring in school day also gives tutors and teachers opportunities to share information, and students are more likely to see their tutors as part of the larger school experience. So embedding really in the school has multiple benefits. The fourth and last model-specific element of high-impact tutoring is data. High-impact programs use data to understand students' learning needs and to track their progress. These data can come from the school or from the teacher, or the program can do their own formative assessments to track progress and design tutoring sessions to meet the needs of individual students. But one of the benefits of tutoring is that you really can target the needs of students, and so you need this kind of data to be able to identify what those are. Regardless of the source of data, what's important is to use the data to tailor instruction for the students. There are a number of barriers to implementing this kind of high-impact tutoring. The biggest barrier in the past, or the biggest barriers, have been scheduling tutoring into already existing school set schedules, funding, and having enough information about what makes, about what high-impact tutoring is to make it easy for districts to adopt that approach. However, we're finding through these pilot sites that we're running, we're running about 10 pilot sites around the country, our court partnering with districts, that we have a window of opportunity right now to overcome some of the barriers that we've had in the past. With schools already having been disrupted and focused on finding solutions, school leaders are searching for and considering new options, including adjusting schedules. Funding is also easier, at least for the next couple of years. And finally, recent research, like we've just been talking about, has allowed us to better understand what drives impact in tutoring so that we have a much clearer understanding of best practices and are working towards tools and capacity to scale tutoring with quality. This may be the best opportunity we'll have to get this proven intervention built into schools for the long run, to provide all students in need with the high-impact tutoring to supplement their classroom work and as part of core instruction. After a tremendous amount of research and outreach, we recently launched the National Student Support Accelerator to make it easier for districts, schools, and nonprofits to adopt high-impact tutoring. Our vision, next slide, please, as you can see on this slide, is that every student in need has access to an effective tutor who champions and ensures their learning and success. The accelerator plans to reach this vision by supporting districts, schools, nonprofits, and tutoring organizations to adopt and grow high-impact tutoring with quality. Next slide. Our three primary strands of work are to catalyze the field of tutoring through communities of practice, research, and conducting these pilot sites, to facilitate implementation through providing tools and technical assistance for districts and tutoring providers to launch and grow high-impact tutoring and to engage and activate stakeholders. Our materials and tools are available on our website, and over time, more will be added. Here are just a couple of examples. We have a tutoring database where you can search for tutoring providers. You can look in your area. You can look at the grade level or subject matter that interests you. Next slide. We are currently working on a tutor quality improvement system, or TQIS, that will help tutoring programs identify their areas of need and plan for improvement. So it's a self-assessment and then improvement, and we will also do direct assessments to create ratings of tutoring organizations that you'll be able to search in that database that we just looked at above. Next. We also have a toolkit for tutoring providers with tools aligned to the seven elements of high-impact tutoring. If you go to the next page, you can just see an example. So here's one under tutors. So you can see the seven elements here in our tool appendix. You can search in the tool appendix through a process, but there are a whole variety of tools. Examples are tutor job description guidance, tutor selection strategy, among many others. Overall, our goal is to synthesize the knowledge from communities of practice and experiences in schools, as well as the knowledge from the kind of more formal research that's been done on some of the tutoring programs around the country to create tools and then to also help design technical assistance so that the tutoring that we provide during this time of need and opportunity is high-impact tutoring and has the best chance of helping students re-engage in school, learn and to thrive. Thank you so much for the opportunity to share what we've learned about high-impact tutoring and about the National Student Support Accelerator, and I look forward to the discussion. Susanna, thank you so much for joining us today and for kicking off our conversation. I kept thinking as you were talking about some words you used about opportunity, used that a number of times. And it just seems to me that over the years we've been given many opportunities but now with your research and with this great toolkit and the Accelerator and the school systems across America will have a great opportunity to think deeply about their work and to implement it in a way perhaps we've not had a chance to do it before. Jill, it is a great pleasure to welcome you. Jill Dr. Baker is the superintendent of California's fourth largest school district. She's worked for 28 years along the unified school district as a teacher, as a principal and central office administrator. Her leadership contributed to increase student achievement, the development of multiple district law initiatives and systems and a culture of continuous improvement. A Long Beach resident, Dr. Baker has been recognized by several community-based organizations for her encouraging leadership and for her advocacy and support for students in need. Jill, thank you so much for being part of our conversation today and for sharing Long Beach and the FI's approach to tutoring. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. I'm sure glad to be here with you all as a learner and as an opportunity to share a glimpse of the work that has taken place in Long Beach Unified School District. I'll start by just sharing the long history that I've had with reading recovery over my entire career. Starting as a teacher, I can recall the impact of my own development as an elementary teacher through the work with reading recovery teachers who were in my building and were able to support me as a student who I was serving. And then as a principal in full implementation of reading recovery at a school with a lot of students of great need and what it meant to our school to build the capacity of those students as well as teachers to accelerate their learning as they left her grade and rose up into the elementary years. And then as an administrator reading recovery, I have seen the impact of this work and now as a superintendent on what it means to bring reading recovery into school buildings. And I'll share with you about the partnership of the reading recovery model for students in something that in Long Beach Unified we call our intensive intervention model which builds the capacity of teachers through coaching along with the direct service to students. So when I think about reading recovery and what goes into our intensive intervention model I think about the investment, the long-term investment in our teacher development the long-term investment in our students. And so you can see from this slide that we have a beautifully diverse district in Long Beach Unified school district students that we serve. Thousands of students over the last 30 years have been served by reading recovery and over time the program has evolved to become more precise and is something that we can say has really helped us to think about comprehensive literacy across our district. At the end of today's conversation you're going to hear about a funding from a funding expert. It's something that's been important to us in funding reading recovery over time. We have schools that fund reading recovery teachers. We've used centralized funds title one and other dollars. We've used the expansion of both reading recovery and intensive intervention model with federal relief funds that are coming to our district. Next slide please. But I want to start in this brief few minutes with you just thinking about high quality instruction because at the foundation of high impact support is high quality instruction. And when I think about that I also think about the greatest level of high quality instruction that we have in our district. And I'll just call attention to part of that vision actually the center of that vision being relationship. So this was originally by design and understandings by design through high quality first instruction. And so there's a link that you can access in the chat that takes you to our vision and understandings by design framework which is why we call it the understandings. It evolved into our own tool but still describes the teacher practices and classroom practices that we want to see in every one of our classrooms that represents high quality instruction. So as it's named in the slide you want high quality standards based instruction and if you get out to the link on our website you'll see what we mean by that. So as I mentioned in the slide there's a link on our website where you can access the flexibility of both text and tasks in classrooms. You three the discourse that high quality discourse and collaboration among students you for the formative assessment practices and then at the center of all of this you six relationships. And I start with this foundation aspiration our understandings continuum is the foundation for when we think about elementary literacy and so to take one step further into a classroom our comprehensive literacy approach at the foundation is high quality learning and reading, writing, speaking and listening and language. And our reading recovery instruction which I'll speak about next and our intensive intervention model have a foundation in these practices. So as I said reading recovery and Long Beach Unified has been an incredible investment over time. Long Beach Unified has its own reading recovery training center which allows us to really customize the supports and the training as many of you will know reading recovery is a university level course that teachers go through and this is making the investment in this is something that has really helped us to ensure that reading recovery isn't just a thing outside of our regular supports and interventions for an acceleration for students that it's part of how we think about literacy across the district. So for three decades this investment has been made to build the capacity of teachers and every single teacher that I celebrate their completion with over the years even the highest performing teachers that go into the program to become a reading recovery teacher speak to the transformation of their teaching practices in service to students. This is also part of our continuous improvement model. So when I think about teaching as a profession being a reading recovery teacher takes high performing teachers and helps them to really increase their own effect on students but also to help other teachers be incredibly committed to their service to students. And then lastly what I'll say about reading recovery before I tell you about our intensive intervention model is that there's a secondary effect of reading recovery that I think is often underestimated and that is and I recall it as a teacher it's watching a team at full implementation meaning that all of the lowest performing first graders in an elementary school building are being served by reading recovery. And that's what we're looking for as in other classrooms classrooms where the reading recovery teacher comes in and supports his or her student back in their classroom classroom where the teacher can go over and look at the guided reading books that are being used and have support in selecting texts for their own classroom. And it's that expertise that we want every single building to have that often is not talked about in thinking about the expense so reading recovery in Long Beach University will continue to be a high dose research based tutoring model that we have seen the success of the transfer of skills from the intensive lessons with the reading recovery teacher back into the classroom. It's high dose tutoring that we know at full implementation is successful for our students. And so with that in mind about two decades after beginning reading recovery we really started to look at our work and think about how to expand the influence of reading recovery itself. And we developed a model that we call the intensive intervention model that is building on high expert teachers who are in direct service to students thinking of them as coaches and how we can use their expertise and literacy build them as coaches to be peer coaches and go out into classrooms and support other teachers as peers. Next slide. We developed this model which I'll just tell you briefly about and then we can ask questions as my time will run out quickly but this intensive intervention model takes the tutoring that takes place in reading recovery but builds it beyond the interaction with students and that is three pillars. One continuation of reading recovery and the second is coaching which I have just quickly described where the reading recovery teacher spends time in classrooms with another teacher coaching and co-teaching and really helping to build the classroom culture as well as the comprehensive literacy model and other classrooms. And then the third which is connected to pillar one and pillar two is very intensified staff development that supports whole school improvement with reading recovery at the heart of this literacy model. And so as we think about the days ahead in accelerating learning and supporting and enriching the experience that our students have had we have this to build upon and so we are readying ourselves to expand reading recovery for students and to place reading recovery in a number of additional schools as well as expanding this idea all of these have a connection in some of you call it response to intervention still some of us call it MTSS all of this is embedded into our district's approach to intervening both on academics and social emotional skills for our students and so we see this as a very research based high impact way to meet the needs of our students across those early learners especially in grade one but so that students in by third grade are all readers and I'll stop there as I know the time is running short and pass to the next colleague thank you so much thank you I love the graphic by the way where you put relationships in the center of all that you do and I was trying to get my notes down as quickly as possible about laser like I'm sure you play as a superintendent with that all the time with the laser focus on learning I can't get all of it as writing down quickly but anyway I want to thank you for getting so much detail so much information and inspiration and thank you also for those of you putting those into chat we'll try to keep up with answering the questions as they come to us but it's now my honor to turn to AJ who grew up in Villa Victoria Puerto Rican community in Boston South and he graduated from Union College and was a posse foundation scholar in 2010 AJ served as the city year core member in Boston Mass and then joined match education in 2011 to launch the tutor dissemination unit with Alvin Safran where they focus on cultivating and establishing school and district partnerships and supporting the startup and implementation of the program at all partner locations he received his MBA from Boston University question school of business specializing in public and nonprofit management and he is a board member of some research Boston AJ thank you so much for joining us today and sharing what you've designed and implemented in tutoring for high school students it's a pleasure to be here yes I'm AJ Gutierrez I'm the co-founder of Saga Education we're a nonprofit we're frequently cited as a leader in implementing high impact tutoring and what we do at Saga Education is deeply important to me it's a personal thing you know as Moran mentioned I was born in Boston Massachusetts with a single mother with three children who did everything she could to make sure that school is a priority for me and my sister despite that the racial and systemic inequities that exist on our education system made it very difficult for me to thrive as a student I was a D plus a C minus student but that all changed when I had the opportunity to go to high school where I work alongside a tutor who often into a year service to connect with me connect with my mother to help me understand what was going on in the classroom to help build my foundational skills and that in turn help increase my confidence and kind of transform my trajectory as a student so I'm coming to everyone today and I'm saying this to you because I'm speaking to you not just as a provider as a partner with schools I'm coming to you today as a rare founder of a nonprofit who's also received the benefits of its work and I'm coming to you today as a representative of a community of learners who have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic next slide please so right now it's talking education we're in four cities in the United States we're in Chicago New York City Broward County Florida and Washington DC we're currently in conversations with Charleston South Carolina Providence about the possibility of watching a program there so we're a mid-sized organization in multiple states next slide please we can skip this one next slide please and so you know we all know every student has the potential to kind of shape his or her success in school and in life not every student has a fair chance to see that and so at SAGA we everything we do focuses on creating equitable opportunity for you and we all know many factors affect student learning but from our perspective a fundamental challenge is the mismatch between where students are academically and what's being taught in the classroom and this challenge existed well before you know COVID-19 and so you know with that said high-impact tutoring is really transformational in the way in which we think about education and school design and so to address this fundamental challenge we provide intensive targeted instructional support in high school mathematics because you know ninth grade algebra is known to be a gatekeeper to a high school diploma you know students who can pass ninth grade algebra are four times more likely to receive a high school diploma which is why we provide support at this critical transition year for you and so for everyone here is thinking about implementing high-impact tutoring it's important to know that you don't have to provide a tutor for every single student at every grade level as you think about that the process and transition you can prioritize these critical growth years, these notes, these high average points which evident shows from J-PAL North America and also a meta-analysis from Harvard it tends to be early literacy and late mathematics next slide please so hallmarks of our approach as an organization involve integrating tutoring as part of the school day as its own class as a great course for students in addition to core classroom instruction and that's really important to keep in mind this is high-impact tutoring designed to supplement classroom instruction and a student would work with his or her tutor every day or every other day throughout the entire duration of the school year so it's important to acknowledge that before we move on it's important to acknowledge that the word tutoring has a lot of baggage and when we think about the no child left behind era and supplemental educational services or SES tutoring programs they show little evidence of effectiveness but we're in a very different position than we were then and we now have substantial randomized control research studies that tell us which models work and so these models have the following frameworks again they're integrated into the school day as its own class they have rigorous training and ongoing feedback to tutors you keep the tutor and student parent consistent throughout the entire duration of the school year you have curriculum that aligns with grade level standards and classroom instruction you use assessments that guide student instruction over the year and you have ongoing and regular communication with parents so you can make sure that parents are part of the learning process with students and so if you are interested in implementing high-impact tutoring as long as you're operating within this framework you have the opportunity to modify the model to meet the needs of your local context as well. And so to understand the effects of our approach in various permutations our research partners at the University of Chicago Urban Education Labs have conducted randomized control research studies since 2012 in fact there are I think over seven randomized control research studies on saga education this right here is just what's been published to date and so you know evidence shows that students can gain you know two and a half years of math growth in one year on standardized test scores and what's really important to know about this particular graph as you can see this is our first year in Chicago we have statistically significant and the magnitude of our effect is pretty substantial but as you can see in the second year we had a greater impact and that's really important to know we were more familiar with the school we had a better sense of how the schools operate and the expectations of the of our new district partner and so we just got better with implementation and so this is important for you to know because if you want to implement high impact tutoring it's likely your program will be good but not excellent and that's okay but you'll be much more successful coming up a learning curve on implementation and results if you have the right support systems in place and so at saga although we provide direct support you know given the magnitude of the effect of COVID-19 you know it's just not enough to directly serve students and so we want to be very mindful about what we're doing as an organization to help build the capacity of others to implement effective high impact tutoring and so if you are serious about implementing this type of program we have a team that's designated to provide support with program design and implementation and if you are interested in that you can go to our website sagaeducation.org to learn more how you can take advantage of that kind of opportunity with us. Next slide please. So as mentioned before in terms of the results there are significant improvements in standardized test scores there was a 60 a high as a 63% reduction in math class failure rates and there was as high as a 26% reduction in failure rates in non-math classes and this is particularly important because this was these were these were subjects that were not tutored by saga education and so to see these spillover effects into these other subjects is a sign that there's improvement in a sense of student self-efficacy and maybe a sign of the value out of the relationships between the students and the tutors. Next slide please. And so I'm showing this slide to you to give you a sense of the program that we use during the randomized control research studies and the models are very continuing to implement so we can learn how we can strengthen the cost effectiveness of high impact tutoring. There are several variables that are important to keep in mind as you think about the cost effectiveness of tutoring one and that deeply affect the cost effectiveness of tutoring. One is that the the stipend or the compensation you provide to tutors that has a significant impact on the cost. The other piece is the frequency in which the students work with the tutor so the dosage in other words. The other variable is the number of students in any given tutorial session so the number of students working with the tutor at any given time and the personal case load of tutor works with throughout the entire duration of the school year. So all these variables have a significant impact on the pendulum where it swings in terms of cost effectiveness. The result I just showed you before was on our traditional model where tutors work with two to three students in any given tutorial period. They have a personal case load of up to 14 students who they would work with throughout the entire duration of the school year. So with that model students receive roughly 140 hours 130, 140 hours of instructional support from tutors it would help in turn generate those results that you see before. At SAGA education with an effective program design you could see significant gains for students in as little as 20 hours of instruction. There's randomized control research study data on a program that we implemented with college board in partnership with NORC that showed strong outcomes for youth in as little as 20 hours. But in terms of a sweet spot especially for an organization that's new to implementing high impact tutoring 60 to 70 hours of instruction you should start to see significant academic improvement for youth over the duration of the school year and ought to be a threshold you're reaching for high impact tutoring. And our blended learning model is an example of that and so in our blended learning model in any given tutorial a tutor would be working with two students at a time live and the other two students are working on an adaptive learning platform and those students kind of switch every other day and so with that model students receive 60 to 70 hours of real time tutorial support throughout the entire duration of the school year and randomized control research study data from the University of Chicago show that even with this model in particular we're still able to have the same kind of effect sizes as our traditional model even though the blended learning model is about 60% of the cost of our traditional model which means our blended learning approach is much more cost effective than our traditional approach. And then the other piece I want to move on to is our online model and so this is actually important because this is the approach we use during COVID-19 and particularly specifically in New York City and Broward County, Florida and in this approach there are no tutors in a classroom so there's a site director it could be a paraprofessional in your context who's in a classroom with the students and so the students when they enter the classroom they go to a laptop or computer and they're either working on an adaptive learning technology or directly with their tutors and all the tutors are online and remote. What I find really appealing about this approach is that this could work really well in a rural or suburban setting so if you are concerned about talent and being able to attract tutors into your community and you don't have an ecosystem of colleges or universities this could be an opportunity for you to provide access to students to high quality tutors. Next slide please. So the tutors you recruit to be part of your program is going to affect your approach on training it's going to affect your approach to professional development. As Saga education our fellows our AmeriCorps members are primarily recent college graduates about 85% of them are interested in the other 15% are mid-career changers or retirees and we have a rigorous application process a qualification process a screening process for our tutors resume review math assessment a sample tutorial a sample tutorial and the sample tutorial is important because it's an opportunity for us to not only gauge the content skill set of a tutor but their ability to connect with youth and you have to find a fine response there I mean we've had tutors who are have PhDs in mathematics and are the worst tutors you can imagine and so this is an opportunity for us to gauge a tutor's ability to form meaningful relationships with youth and can reflect on their own performance. Each team is managed by a site director whose main responsibility is to provide ongoing coaching and feedback to the tutors and so if you're a district leader and you worry about principals and tutors well one approach that you can take is by creating the site director role which could be the teacher of record for the class which could be a certified educator within your state who's responsible serving as the liaison between the tutors and the teachers that line with the classroom and instruction and to report to administration. So Alan Safran who is a co-founder of SAGA education has been implementing high-impact tutoring for 17 years now when I was a 14 year old at the high school where he was executive director and so he can look at high-impact tutoring through a number of lenses not only from a school leaders perspective from his experience being the executive director of a school from nine years and also from a state's perspective from his time serving as the deputy commissioner of education in Massachusetts so he's identified these seven elements that are important things of consideration if you're thinking about implementing high-impact tutoring and he's going to go in depth in all these issues on May 4 and two webinars where he's going to walk through program design things to think about in terms of human capital training curriculum communication measurement and funding. Next slide please. The last thing I would like to share is that SAGA education on May 4 May 1 we're standing up a free portal on components of effective tutoring so we've codified what we know to be components of effective tutoring and put it on this engaging self-guided platform this is 100% free and so and it's scalable and so if you have an influx of lots of tutors one of the things you can do as part of the portfolio of things you do to prepare those tutors you can have them go through this four-hour self-guided training portal that's agnostic to subject that's agnostic to the grade level that's that these are the necessary things tutors need to know in order to be effective and again that's a free resource that you can utilize starting May 1 thank you so much. Thank you AJ and thank you for telling your story for your commitment to students and for that free resource thank you very much let us move right into Michael Griffin who is a senior researcher and policy analyst at LPI he's part of LPI's equitable resources and access team where he focuses on school funding issues before joining the LPI team Griffin was a school finance expert first with the education commission of the states and then as an independent contractor over the past 20 years he has worked with policy makers in all 50 states to help them reshape and reform their school funding systems always improve student achievement and education equity Michael thank you for being with us today I am just really eager as a superintendent to hear your perspective about how we reallocate our resources to improve student learning thank you great thank you very much we can go to the first slide please great thanks so I have 10 minutes or less to explain to you the largest federal investment in public education in our lifetime so I'm going to be moving quickly I'm going to be throwing a lot of numbers at you but don't worry not only will you have this PowerPoint available to you afterwards we have several publications on our website that will walk you through all of the spending and the mandates and allowable expenses but you're also welcome to email me afterwards if you think of questions later or if you want a more in-depth discussion about any of this so what I'm going to be talking about is how much money have the feds provided what can it be used for what do states and districts need to know before they expend these funds and then some of the maintenance provisions that exist so if we can go to the next slide great so overall for K-12 education it's about $200 billion that the feds are providing through various funds to put this into perspective during the great recession the feds provided about $90 billion so we're talking over two times the last big federal investment in education most of the money is going through secondary school emergency relief fund which we just referred to as ESSER but there is money that was given to governors about $4.3 billion that they had discretion over $3 billion in addition was put into special education $5.5 billion for non-public schools $800 billion for homelessness and then another billion going to tribal education and education for outlying areas so I'm going to go to the next slide what I'm going to be focusing in on though through this discussion are the ESSER funds they're the biggest part and they're the ones that are the most flexible for your use so you can see here in each of the three recovery acts the CARES Act that passed last March the coronavirus response and relief supplemental appropriation act which passed in December and then finally the American Rescue Plan Act that passed under about $190 billion which comes to about $3,800 per student to put that into perspective that's about 25% of what you of spending on a per pupil basis nationally so as far as the rescue plan money where does it distribute it well 10% goes to states and you can see the breakdown there that 5% has to be spent on learning loss and then learning in after school and then you can reserve up to 0.5% to be a state for administrative cost and then you have $3 billion as a state flexible funding LEAs though are getting the bulk of this so they're getting 90% 20% has to be spent on learning loss programs but the remaining $87.8 billion is flexible and can be spent any way that is allowable under federal provisions if we can go to the next slide so these are the allowable expenditure areas so that $87.8 billion can be spent on anything allowed under ESEA Perkins or IDEA there are also some other additional uses that you can use for things like if you still need PPE if you still need additional cleaning to your buildings and facilities also you can spend it on facility funding if it is for student health and specifically mentioned in the law is for HVAC systems so you could use this funding for that so when we talk about strategies for accelerating learning you were talking today about tutoring but you could also use these funds for things like summer learning, effective teacher programs, assessing student needs providing expanded learning time and that time would be both for the school day and the school year and then funding providing for community school programs in your state if we go to the next slide in addition to all of that you can provide students and staff with safe school openings on again cleaning materials if you needed it safety within the school to help students you can use it to upgrade facilities for healthy learning environments and you could use it to stabilize and diversify your educator workforce so one of the things here is and we'll talk a bit about it in one of the future slides is you could use this funding to pay your teachers to recruit teachers to train teachers to make sure that you can afford it once this money is done now we've got a lot of questions about when do you get this money and when do you have to expend or obligate it by so states have already distributed the CARES Act funding you have until September 30th 2022 to spend this or obligate it most districts have already gotten this and they've expended it or they're in the process of doing so the December package you have until September 30th 2023 to obligate it and the American Rescue Plan Act you have until September 30th 2024 I know it's a bit confusing within the law it actually says you have until September 30th 2023 but there's this provision that the feds have called the tidings amendment that extends all dates for a year and then once that date hits it doesn't mean it has to be expended by then it simply means it needs to be obligated by that point so once it's obligated you have another five years so the rescue plan funding doesn't really need to be fully expended until 2029 so there are maintenance of effort provisions and if we could skip over this I won't talk about the state one they're and we'll skip over this one too please we'll talk about the maintenance of equity for LEAs which is really important so as an LEA you cannot decrease either per pupil funding or staffing levels for your highest poverty schools in an amount that exceeds district wide reductions and the bill defines high poverty schools as the 25% of schools serving the highest percent of economically disadvantaged students in the LEA right now it doesn't look like in most states that we'd see reductions but if for some reason you do have to reduce funding you just have to make sure you're following these guidelines to not disproportionately hurt your high poverty schools either in the funding per pupil funding amount or in the staffing levels that you provide if you can move on to the next slide please so this is the important things to think about how can you blend this funding so you don't have to spend it separate from your current state and local funding you can use it together to help enhance some of your programs so think about it how can you use these federal dollars in conjunction with your state and local funding to achieve your education goals for your students be prepared to be flexible there are different ways to think about these things one of the things I've talked to some places about so you can't necessarily afford to raise all your teacher pay right now because at a certain point you're going to run out of these funds but what you could do is think of things like bonuses recruiting bonuses signing bonuses things like that that are one time expenses to help recruit and retain people on your staff but that will go away once this money you also should think about using these funds for long-term investments so if you can use it to pay for infrastructure for your programs you can use it to facility funding things like that that are longer term so that once the money is expended these things will still be around for your students and your staff afterwards again making sure that you don't fall off a cliff with this money and that's a big concern that districts and states will take this money and spend it but then once it's done you either have to discontinue all the programs that you started or you know you'll have to lay off staff or you know you just put yourself in a position that you can no longer afford to do the things that you wanted to do so you know think of both which is difficult right think of long-term investments without creating long-term cost you into falling off that cliff if we can move on to the final slide then great so I know I talked was quick with this in fact I have 40 seconds left to kind of summarize all of this but here are some of our resources that we have for you here's my contact information I'd love to talk to you about some of these investments some of these things that you can and can't do the timelines any sort of questions that you have that are more detailed with school funding in this rescue package and with that I think we're ready to move on to Q&A Michael thank you so much for putting your email up there and allowing folks the opportunity to write to you directly thank you all who are panelists today I'm just thinking this is another episode of Fire Host Theater that we've had so much that's so in such a short amount of time I don't know whether my LPI and ASA colleagues since we are pressed for time there are so many questions in chat maybe we could figure out how to call those questions and do some feedback as we send out the link in the recording for today but I think we're just about out of time and so let's let's know that you're going to get a recording of this that we very much appreciate Susanna, Jill, AJ and Michael for your expertise for your time today so we wish all of you just a wonderful day and thank you for the service that you do for children each and every day in America thank you