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Danielle Sanderson Edwards
Public school systems across the U.S. have made major investments in tutoring to support students’ academic recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We evaluate a large urban district’s efforts to design, implement, and scale a district-operated, standards-based tutoring program across three years. We draw on extensive interviews and survey data to document the dynamic changes in the program as Metro Nashville Public Schools integrated core operations into its leadership and school structures, expanded tutor supply by pivoting from a volunteer to a teacher-based staffing model, and addressed scheduling constraints by offering tutoring immediately before and after school in addition to during the school day. The district steadily scaled the program across two years, delivering over 125,000 total hours of tutoring to more than 6,800 students while also increasing dosage each semester. Using a collection of experimental and quasi-experimental designs, we find consistent evidence of a small to medium average positive effect on students’ reading test scores (0.04 to 0.09 standard deviations), but no average effects on math test scores or course grades in either subject. We discuss four possible explanations for these results, including a limited treatment-control contrast, modest program duration, heterogeneous effects, and miscalibrated expectations of tutoring effects at scale.
“Grow Your Own” (GYO) programs have recently emerged as a promising approach to expand teacher supply, address localized teacher shortages, and diversify the profession. However, little is known about the scale and design of GYO programs, which recruit and support individuals from the local community to become teachers. We conduct a quantitative content analysis to describe 94 GYO initiatives. We find that GYO is used broadly as an umbrella term to describe teacher pipeline programs with very different purposes, participants, and program features. Our results suggest that misalignment between some GYOs’ purposes and program features may inhibit their effectiveness. Finally, we propose a new typology to facilitate more precise discussions of GYO programs.
We develop a unifying conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then generate and test hypotheses about geographic and subject variation in teacher shortages using data on unfilled teaching positions in Tennessee during the fall of 2019. We find that teacher staffing challenges are highly localized, causing shortages and surpluses to coexist. Aggregate descriptions of staffing challenges mask considerable variation between schools and subjects within districts. Schools with fewer local early-career teachers, smaller district salary increases, worse working conditions, and higher historical attrition rates have higher vacancy rates. Our findings illustrate why viewpoints about, and solutions to, shortages depend critically on whether one takes an aggregate or local perspective.