California's Christmas list should include a sleigh full of tutors for public schools

Tutor us, Santa baby.

Don’t bother bringing Californians four lords-a-leaping or eight swans-a-swimming, St. Nick. What we need now are 5.9 million tutors — one for every public school student.

You could fill a giant sack with all the research showing that one-on-one tutoring is students’ best bet for catching up academically after two long, pandemic-disrupted years. In testing last spring, half of California students failed to meet state standards in English. In math, two-thirds of all students fell short. California eighth graders are testing at fifth-grade levels in math.

Tutoring is the best gift you could give kids this Christmas, and not just because it’s been shown to be the best way for students to make rapid advances in achievement. California children, after years of isolation, desperately need the connection to learning that skilled one-on-one tutors — teachers, school staffers, older students with training — can provide with sufficient time, ideally three sessions a week.

Why do you need your intervention, Santa? Because you always deliver, while California, for all adults’ good intentions, struggle to manage programs that serve kids. Despite increases in school funding, this state fails to provide high-quality teachers, sufficient counseling, and classes. Despite massive expansion of health programs, California children aren’t that healthy.

Instead of creating one efficient system to solve any of these problems, California prefers to placate interest groups by creating smaller piecemeal programs that don’t really fit together.

This is what is happening with tutoring.

Instead of building a comprehensive tutoring program for every children, the state is spreading educational recovery funds around the state to smaller programs. In the pandemic, California sent nearly $5 billion in federal stimulus funds for learning loss to local school districts, with so little oversight that we don’t know how much was spent on tutoring, or whether that tutoring helped students.

A new $8 billion grant this year is more promising because it’s restricted to intensive tutoring, literacy intervention, counseling, and additional learning time. But it’s still not clear how much tutoring it will produce.

Why not?

One reason is that our volatile state budget, in surplus last year, now faces projected shortfalls with recession looming. Could some money be clawed back to plug budget holes? Another is that our school districts, like employers everywhere, report being unable to hire or train enough people to be tutors.

As a result, we are building a piecemeal system of tutoring and other academic .

Some of those pieces are useful. The state just invested in hiring literacy coaches in low-income elementary schools. The California State Library is providing free online homework assistance for California K-12 students, through HelpNow, a 24-hour live, real-time platform with qualified tutors. Gov. Newsom just launched the College Corps, a California version of AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps. Half of its first class of 3,250 California college and university students are working as tutors and mentors in school districts and after-school programs.

There is no shortage of ideas about expanding tutoring, inside and outside of government, for California to draw upon. The founder of Khan Academy is trying to create an online tutoring marketplace. An MIT professor is pitching artificial intelligence for tutoring aimed at academic recovery. And at the federal level, there are proposals in Congress to expand AmeriCorps’ national community service network to make tutoring a priority.

But none of these amount to the universal program we need: dedicated tutors, who can teach one-on-one multiple times weekly and get our students caught up.

Perhaps, in a different state and country, in a different time, a moment like this might be seen as an opportunity to remake public education into a more personalized and effective system. But that’s not happening. Because in 21st century California, providing what is necessary would take a miracle.

So, it’s up to you Santa. Just how many tutors can you fit in your sleigh?

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: California's Christmas list should include a sleigh full of tutors