Unacceptably high numbers of students are testing below state standards, 50% in reading and more than 60% in math, according to state assessment data from the California Department of Education. Chronic absenteeism, while improving from pandemic peaks, remains well above pre-2020 levels in many districts. At the same time, school systems continue to teacher shortages and high early-career attrition.

Federal relief funds temporarily expanded tutoring and student support programs. But those dollars have largely expired. District leaders are now tasked with advancing academic recovery while operating in a far more constrained fiscal environment.

The question facing policymakers and superintendents is not whether students need more support. It is how to provide that support sustainably, without further overburdening teachers and budgets.

One statewide model offers an effective answer: the .

The network is a coalition of 14 AmeriCorps programs operating in more than 30 communities, from Sacramento to San Diego and Fresno to El Centro, with a presence at more than 200 schools and youth programs. The network recruits, trains and places full- and part-time student success coaches directly in K–12 public schools.

These coaches are near-peer mentors and tutors. They’re typically recent high school or college graduates between the ages of 18 and 25 exploring careers in education and youth development or simply looking for what’s next in their lives.

Applicants are recruited locally and through higher education collaborations such as California Community Colleges. They undergo screening, interviews and background checks consistent with AmeriCorps requirements. Before entering schools, they receive training in tutoring strategies, relationship-building and student engagement.

Unlike short-term volunteers, the coaches are embedded on campus to become a part of the school community, not just a periodic guest. During their time of service, typically a full school year, they provide targeted, evidence-based support aligned with school priorities directly in the classroom. That can include one-on-one and small-group tutoring,. attendance support and family communication support, academic mentoring and goal setting and social-emotional skill reinforcement.

Coaches can be directed to provide priority support to students who are identified by school staff based on academic performance, attendance patterns or other indicators.

This model is built upon a strong body of research demonstrating that high-impact tutoring and consistent mentoring relationships can improve engagement and accelerate academic gains. A landmark meta-analysis of found that tutoring is one of the “most versatile and potentially transformative educational tools” for substantial learning gains across grade levels.

Of course, coaches do not replace teachers, but they vitally extend classroom capacity, augment the learning environment and allow teachers to focus on core instruction. 

While AmeriCorps programs like this have existed for decades, the Student Success Coach Learning Network was created with intent to make a larger impact through the power of collaboration, information and resource sharing, and advocacy. The metrics support the efficacy of the efforts.

Across participating SSCLN programs in the 2023 and 2024 school years:

• 73% of students supported by Student Success Coaches improved their semester grades.
• 77% improved their grades over the full academic year.
• 95% of students served graduated from high school, compared with California’s statewide graduation rate of 87%.

Additionally, organizations within the network reported positive improvements in strengthening attendance efforts including reduced absenteeism and increased days attended, with two specific organizations showing an average 56% improvement in attendance-related measures. 

These results are consistent with national findings. A nationally representative survey of K–12 principals conducted by the at Johns Hopkins University found that schools providing people-powered, evidence-based supports such as tutoring report measurable improvements in attendance and academic engagement.

For district leaders, the takeaway is straightforward: Additional trained adults embedded daily in schools help students stay on track.

Roughly 36% of student success coaches through this network pursue careers in education following their service year. A year spent working alongside teachers, students and families provides hands-on experience, professional mentorship and a bridge into teaching with a realistic view of classroom life.

This matters in a state where teacher shortages remain particularly acute in some communities.

The workforce implications extend beyond education. Research from , analyzing millions of job postings, found that seven of the 10 most in-demand skills are “durable skills,” including communication, teamwork, empathy and adaptability. Coaches practice these competencies daily as they collaborate with educators, communicate with families, and navigate complex student needs. In that sense, the model addresses two policy priorities simultaneously: student recovery and American workforce development overall.

Because AmeriCorps members receive a living allowance and a help paying off student loans or graduate school tuition through state and federal investment, districts can expand student support capacity with modest local contributions.

This structure offers flexibility as districts add educator capacity without committing to permanent staff positions that may be difficult to sustain during budget downturns. That can extend classroom capacity for students and strengthen a pipeline of future educators.

The impact is people helping people. Young adults are choosing to serve in support of students who might have looked a lot like them just a few short years earlier. They are supporting a teacher who may just need that extra hand and energy they gain through teamwork. And students gain access to a personal mentor whose support may just change their education trajectory. 

As California looks ahead to future budget cycles and leadership transitions, the question is not whether the state can afford to invest in coordinated, people-powered student supports.

It is whether it can afford not to.

Join ����Ӱ�� and the Progressive Policy Institute at 1 p.m. ET Wednesday for a special conversation about national service organizations, like AmeriCorps, and the impact cuts to their funding could have on the future of public education. 

PPI’s Curtis Valentine will lead a conversation with Legends Charter Schools’ CEO Atasha James and Rick Kahlenberg, director of PPI’s Housing Policy and the American Identity Project, about the power of individuals to improve educational outcomes for all children.

Sign up for the Zoom or tune in to this page Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET to stream the event.

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• AmeriCorps’ Work With Students: In Limbo Despite Halt to Federal Funding Cuts 
  
• McMahon Takes Flak From Democrats, Republicans at Congressional Budget Hearing

When a federal judge earlier this month ordered the Trump administration to restore AmeriCorps funding, there was no relief for the hundreds of service groups that tutor children and staff summer programs in Republican-led states that sat out the lawsuit.

Even in the 24 Democrat-led states that , the logistics of reinstating funding remain unclear. Some states are hesitant to turn on the tap when a higher court could still uphold the cuts. And with , the department has limited ability to actually restore the grants and provide guidance to states. The uncertainty is complicating school partnerships and recruitment efforts for the next school year.

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State commissions that oversee AmeriCorps now are navigating “a really uneven field,” said Kaira Esgate, CEO of the , a national organization overseeing state service commissions, governor-led public agencies that distribute AmeriCorps grants.

Rural communities who tend to rely on the agency to fund both public service and job opportunities have been particularly hard hit.

AmeriCorps supports educational programs, conservation efforts, and community service across the United States. It funds national programs such as CityYear and Teach for America as well as smaller grassroots organizations. For many communities, AmeriCorps programming also provides a pipeline for recruiting future educators.

More than 28% of organizations receiving are in states that did not have their funding reinstated, according to a Chalkbeat analysis.

This partial restoration of AmeriCorps funding is one example of a broader pattern that’s emerged, , while Republican-led states don’t. For example, federal courts have and only to states that sued, leading to unequal access to services and funding across the United States.

This Wednesday, a U.S. District Court in Maryland will hear a lawsuit brought by AmeriCorps-funded nonprofits, educational advocacy groups, and the AmeriCorps Employees Union AFSCME Local 2027. The lawsuit in every state and put AmeriCorps agency staff back on the job before the 2025-26 school year.

“Our summer school and after-school programs have a lot of AmeriCorps people who work there, and suddenly all those people are no longer serving,” says Chris Giorlando, the grant manager at , an AmeriCorps-funded K-12 school whose funding was not reinstated. “It limits what we can do for students.”

Rural communities hit hardest by AmeriCorps cuts

Mahpiya Luta serves the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, a state that did not join the first lawsuit. The school is one of the plaintiffs in the AmeriCorps lawsuit to be heard on Wednesday.

AmeriCorps staff at Mahpiya Luta provided one-on-one instruction for students, worked as classroom aides, supported after-school programming, and coached the school’s state-recognized sports teams.

“The AmeriCorps members who served here, the young Lakota people who served our program, really changed a lot of lives,” said Giorlando, an AmeriCorps alum. Giorlando received an email on April 25 notifying him that the school’s AmeriCorps grant would be terminated immediately by the federal government.

Following the termination of its grant, Mahpiya Luta was able to pay AmeriCorps members for the last three weeks of the school year by drawing from the school’s reserve budget. Originally, the AmeriCorps members would have been paid through the end of June, and AmeriCorps funding would have supported summer programming at the school.

Rural communities like Pine Ridge Reservation . Many staff members at Mahpiya Luta programs.

“We used our AmeriCorps program as a kind of pipeline to get people interested in education and get into teaching,” said Moira Coomes, superintendent of Mahpiya Luta. “One of the really big problems in all rural areas is you just don’t have a bank of people waiting to become teachers.”

By offering job opportunities to people in the local community, AmeriCorps grants allowed Mahpiya Luta students to benefit from one-on-one mentorship from young adults on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Around 53% of children on the Pine Ridge Reservation live below the poverty line, according to 2023 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“It’s super important for kids, especially kids in a setting like ours, that they’re seeing adults who look like them, who come from where they come from,” Coomes said. “So that they see that as something they can aspire to.”

In the fall, Mahpiya Luta is hoping to find the money to hire at least kindergarten and first grade aides in the absence of grant funding, but without federal funding, the school’s ability to provide robust in-classroom support and after-school programming will be limited. Giorlando is still searching for alternative means of funding to help fill the void left by AmeriCorps cuts, but he noted that in rural communities, there are limited sources.

“Those are just holes that will not get filled,” Coomes said.

AmeriCorps funding uncertain despite federal judge’s order

Many of the states that should be receiving reinstated funds from AmeriCorps due to the federal judge’s order are still unsure when and how that will happen.

AmeriCorps notified nonprofits whose grants were reinstated the day after the June 5 injunction, but the American Service Commission is still waiting for further information from the agency in order to offer states guidance on next steps.

Following the grant terminations on April 25, a number of states placed “stop-service” orders in effect, immediately ending the work of AmeriCorps-supported programs by the following Monday, April 28. Many of these states have decided not to lift these restrictions as they wait for further clarity. The federal government has 60 days after the June 5 injunction to file an appeal, which could disrupt programs once again, although the federal government has yet to do so.

“We’ve got 52 commissions,” said Esgate of the American Service Commission. “I wouldn’t say that we have 52 different ways that people approach this, but quite a few different ways that we approach this.”

For example, AmeriCorps programs in Wisconsin have already restarted for the summer.

, a summer camp for people with disabilities, is already in the process of onboarding new AmeriCorps members, a week after camp began. But Cally Ehle, the Easterseals grant manager, acknowledged that “there’s a possibility that they may shut us down again.”

“It’s a lot of scrambling now because there were a lot of things that needed to be done for enrollment and the handbooks and training. With everything being terminated, it just kind of shut down,” Ehle said.

By contrast, Michigan has kept its stop-service order in place, preventing AmeriCorps programs from returning to work, even despite the injunction. That’s hurt programs like the , though some work can continue with other funding sources.

“The injunction got lifted, but that doesn’t mean that money is showing up,” said Holly Windram, the founder of Michigan Education Corps. “We lost about $130,000 of reimbursable dollars that we should have been able to get from AmeriCorps. With the injunction, in theory, we should be able to get that. Well, no one knows how that’s going to be facilitated.”

AmeriCorps grants for next school year are unsettled

As of now, AmeriCorps grants for the 2025-26 school year are still supposed to be allocated for all states. However, the majority of AmeriCorps staff has been placed on leave, severely limiting administrative ability. The case to be heard Wednesday seeks the reinstatement of this staff to ensure that grants for the next year can be properly allocated.

“We don’t know what that date is going to look like quite yet, but it is going to be later than normal, and I imagine that’s going to be incredibly disruptive,” Esgate said of when programs will get 2025-26 funding. “Typically education programs are always working to get members recruited, hired, trained, and that they’re ready to go the first day of school and that is definitely not going to happen this time around.”

The Michigan Education Corps has assured the schools in their network that they will continue providing programming, but they haven’t been able to follow up with individuals who have reached out to tutor with them for next year.

Given the delays in the group’s recruitment cycle, Windram worries that they might not have the volunteers they need to provide academic interventions for their students.

“It’s our kids that lose,” Windram said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

In both cases, we collaborate with programs across the country that help bring additional people into schools — beyond traditional staffers — to meet the scale and intensity of students’ post-pandemic needs. 

AmeriCorps has been a critical asset to this work, providing committed and engaged citizens willing to serve their schools and communities in a time of enormous need. If Congress does not act, though, AmeriCorps’s participation could drop significantly — or even go away altogether. This would impact hundreds of thousands of students at a critical time.

AmeriCorps provides funding to nonprofit organizations and stipends to volunteers, allowing them to work full time in communities. Thousands of them assist schools with tutoring to help address learning recovery and develop relationships with students and their families to take on chronic absenteeism.

In Philadelphia, for example, recruits, trains and coaches a racially and generationally diverse cohort of AmeriCorps members who work full time delivering daily, 30-minute, in-person tutoring to pairs of students in grades K-3. Joyful Readers’ AmeriCorps tutors utilize a multi-sensory, structured language program that provides research-based materials and strategies that are essential to a comprehensive reading, spelling and handwriting program. They served approximately 1,120 students during the 2023-24 school year.

In Minnesota, Mississippi and New York, delivers high-dosage math tutoring to K-3 students using AmeriCorps members, providing early intervention. Math Corps AmeriCorps tutors also track students’ progress and regularly meet with coaches to assess data and work toward learning targets. To date, Math Corps has served 55,451 students across urban, rural and suburban schools, with the goal of using evidence-based math curriculum to set students on a STEM career trajectory.

implements the Minnesota Promise Fellows program, deploying AmeriCorps members as success coaches in schools and districts statewide to address chronic absenteeism. Promise Fellows serve on district attendance teams and assist school and district staff by collecting data; sharing information on health care, mental health, housing and other resources with students and families; and forging strong relationships with young people to support engagement, attendance and academic success.

AmeriCorps has been around since the 1990s, with support from both Democratic and Republican administrations and congressional leadership, and in that time has grown to recruit around 70,000 members each year. The House has now proposed gutting AmeriCorps. The Senate should reject that proposal and fund AmeriCorps at a level that ensures that service will continue uninterrupted. In fact, schools and communities — especially those that have been historically underserved — need more AmeriCorps members to act as tutors, mentors and student success coaches to meet this moment. 

Schools and communities are working hard to get kids back to where they should be. . Absenteeism is a massive challenge facing schools, and they want help in addressing it. Effective strategies exist, but schools need additional adults – with robust training and ongoing guidance from leadership — to help schools, families and students address various obstacles to regular school attendance. When schools have a majority of students behind grade level in reading and math, as is true in many high-poverty areas, they need to employ high-dosage tutoring. These initiatives require people — and AmeriCorps each year identifies precisely the kind of people the nation’s students need. 

This is a key moment to help schools and children across the country. There is broad bipartisan agreement about the urgency of addressing learning gaps and absenteeism, and there is enormous public support for initiatives like tutoring that reach the most vulnerable kids. Congress needs to ensure that AmeriCorps can deploy the tens of thousands of dedicated individuals willing to serve in schools and communities at this crucial moment.

AmeriCorps works in all 50 states — one of the rare programs that benefits both red and blue America. The cost of restoring AmeriCorps program levels and helping hundreds of thousands of kids is modest. But the cost of inaction is high. Unaddressed learning loss and absenteeism will lead to fewer students graduating prepared for adult success, resulting in social and economic costs to communities and the nation. We urge Congress to support AmeriCorps, its members working in schools across the country and the students they serve.

An important piece of ’s work focuses on improving the futures of Idaho youth, particularly those in rural communities. In a number of ways, AmeriCorps funding plays a key role in our programs.

Teach For America teachers are also AmeriCorps members. They can use Segal AmeriCorps Education Awards to pay for teacher certification or to pay down their existing student debt. Participation in AmeriCorps also enables them to defer their undergraduate loans for the first two years of teaching and have the interest, which accrues during those two years, paid off by the federal government.

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These awards help us recruit a more socio-economically diverse teaching force, which helps boost student learning in underserved communities. If this significant benefit were to disappear, it would have a strongly negative impact on our recruiting efforts. Since launching in Idaho in 2015, Teach For America teachers have reached more than 30,000 Idaho students.

It has been Teach For America’s experience that many individuals who want to serve, particularly as educators, are unable to do so. They face significant economic barriers, including high student debt and the cost of teacher certification, which make it difficult to enter a lower-paying profession such as teaching.

It’s important that people understand that beyond the overwhelmingly positive impact Teach For America has on students, our AmeriCorps members also gain a great deal of knowledge and experience from working with us. They frequently turn that experience into careers.

Former Teach For America teachers now work in all echelons of our state’s education system. Some are teachers, others are principals or school board members. Their experience in Idaho classrooms, made possible in part by AmeriCorps, represents only the beginning of their contributions to education in our state.

Idaho’s congressmenRep. Russ Fulcher and Rep. Mike Simpson should know that Idahoans value the programming made possible by the presence of AmeriCorps in our state.

Reducing its footprint would harm the people who need its services most. It is truly a hidden gem in the Gem State.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: info@idahocapitalsun.com. Follow Idaho Capital Sun on and .

“We can’t mobilize fast enough,” said Robert Balfanz, an education professor running the new National Partnership for Student Success, housed at Johns Hopkins University. “There are still some lost opportunities.” 

But he said the effort’s connection to the White House and AmeriCorps — a national agency that recruits volunteers for community service — is central to overcoming staffing challenges that have plagued efforts by schools and nonprofit organizations to scale up tutoring efforts since the beginning of the pandemic. 

“Everybody has been trying to solve this in their own little microworld,” he said. 

Working with colleges, large employers like Starbucks and Target, and established nonprofit organizations serving youth, Balfanz said, should develop the Partnership into the national tutoring corps that experts have been recommending for several years. AmeriCorps will also spend $20 million to help organizations recruit and train tutors.

In March, President Joe Biden encouraged Americans to “sign up” as volunteers and mentors for students struggling to recover from school closures. The new initiative follows recent showing that learning declines among students were worse in districts slower to return to in-person learning. “What I’m asking for is a level of urgency unlike any level of urgency we’ve had,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said last week during the virtual announcement, joined by White House Domestic Policy Adviser Susan Rice. They stressed that districts should be using American Rescue Plan funds for academic recovery through high-quality tutoring, afterschool and summer programs — and if they aren’t, they should start. 

The law “requires that 20% be spent on learning loss. But it is increasingly clear that for many districts, that guesstimate was way too low,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, who has argued that districts make students’ academic progress their “north star” for allocating funds. 

Tennessee is among the states directing relief money toward tutoring. — which stands for Accelerating Literacy and Learning — began in the 2020-21 school year and now involves over 80 districts, which provide matching funds to participate. 

Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn said the state has learned lessons from implementation that could benefit the national effort. The state program, she said, contributed to recent showing that performance in English language arts among elementary students is back to pre-pandemic levels, with students making greater gains than they have in five years. Gaps in math due to learning loss are also shrinking. 

But at the district level, students performed better when tutoring was offered during the school day instead of before or after school, and when tutors were paid educators instead of volunteers. Some districts, she said, hire “surplus” educators who don’t yet have a classroom position, retired teachers and those still in teacher preparation programs.

“There is a general misunderstanding that you can just find a body, put them in a classroom and anybody can tutor,” Schwinn said. That’s one reason why she said it’s not “super realistic” to have a “meaningful” national program in place for fall.

Roza added that districts have already approved their budgets for the 2022-23 school year and changing them will require school board approval. 

As part of last week’s announcement, the Education Department launched showing how other states are using the funds. And building on efforts from and , also at Georgetown, the National Center for Education Statistics will track the extent to which schools are spending the money on tutoring and other academic enrichment programs.

“If your children aren’t getting the support they need, you will have the tools to make sure your principal or superintendent or mayor hear about it,” Cardona said. “Funding alone is not going to get it done. If anything, you could waste it. We could be looking back five years from now and saying, ‘Did we do everything we could have done?’ ”

In the American Rescue Plan, Congress set aside more than $1 billion each for summer and afterschool programs, and the department has encouraged districts to use relief funds to enlist community-based organizations to help students catch up and reconnect to school. 

With summer programs already in progress, Cardona urged districts to find a balance between engaging programs that interest students and ensuring that tutoring efforts are tightly connected to what students learn in school. 

Since 2020, the administration has urged districts to use relief funds to help students make up for lost learning over the summer. A new from Education Reform Now highlights how states have fared. It shows that 15 states require districts to join with outside groups to serve students over the summer. But just 10 states have requirements on how long such programs should be and how many hours they should devote to academic instruction.

Arkansas, Connecticut, Louisiana, Mississippi and Washington, D.C. require programs to have one staff member for every 15 students, a ratio backed up by research. The report noted that state officials worry that adding dosage and staffing requirements would discourage programs from applying for grant funds in light of “widespread reporting” on vacancies, turnover and stressed-out staff. 

Locating the Partnership at Johns Hopkins, where Balfanz runs the Everyone Graduates Center and is a respected researcher on dropout prevention and improving school climate, increases the focus on using proven strategies. 

“This is not just somebody helping you with homework every third Sunday. What we need is really high-intensity tutoring. It’s multiple connections with your mentor in a week,” Balfanz said at last week’s event. “If you’re only showing up once every 21 days … you’re not there to give support in the moment when it’s needed. That’s really what turns the kid around when they know there’s someone there that has their back.”

Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance — one of the organizations involved in the Partnership — said working with AmeriCorps is also a “terrific way” to address the facing afterschool programs. 

Michael Smith, CEO of AmeriCorps, has the same expectations for school districts.

“We know that this partnership will lead to an increased pipeline of educators,” he said, noting City Year, Teach for America and the College Advising Corps as proven examples. “When young people are working in the schools, working next to children, they get a spark. They get ignited, and the data is showing us that they stay … in the education system.”