FEV Tutor, a chat-based, virtual tutoring firm with contracts in districts from California to Florida alerted staff on Saturday that efforts to raise more money or find a buyer had failed. CEO Reed Overfelt cited “worse-than-expected company performance” in his message to employees.

Some districts promptly alerted families about the interruption in services. The Henrico County Public Schools in Virginia referred parents to other tutors, including teachers, “to minimize the impact of FEV’s closure.” The Ector County Independent School District in Texas asked its other provider, Air Tutors, if it could take on the 2,000 students FEV left behind. 

“We found this all out on Sunday,” said Ector spokesman Michael Adkins. “We’ll have to work very quickly to change things over, but as of today, we are expecting we will be able to find a virtual tutor for all of our kids.”

‘Too fast, too quickly’

While districts and other tutoring providers might be able to cobble solutions together, FEV’s demise is one of the more visible early signs of what school finance experts warned would happen when nearly $190 billion in pandemic relief funds ran out. Districts have less money to spend on vendor contracts, leaving companies that were in high demand a year ago having to rethink their futures. Those that expanded at a rapid clip, like FEV Tutor, could be particularly vulnerable. 

“We saw what you would expect with large government programs — a lot of folks rushing out with various models,” said Adam Newman, founder and managing partner of Tyton Partners, a consulting firm. “A lot of those organizations grew too fast, too quickly.”

With district contracts in at least 30 states and an estimated value of over $40 million, FEV Tutor was an “early innovator in providing virtual tutoring services” through an on-demand, chat-based platform, Newman said.  With customers including the , and school districts, the company gave tutors access to an AI coach and engaged in innovative contracts in which tutors earned higher rates when students showed greater improvement. 

They were “massive players” in the industry, and when districts started spending their  relief funds , FEV was “very well-positioned to win all these district [contracts],” added John Failla, founder and CEO of Pearl, a company that helps districts manage tutoring programs. “They scaled up like crazy.”

But while its closing was unexpected, the financial reality that caused it was not. 

A year ago, one expert noted that investments in ed tech had dropped back to pre-pandemic levels. Even in late 2022, “rising inflation, interest rates, geopolitical crises and belt-tightening brought an end to the copious amounts of capital that defined the pandemic,” Tony Wan, head of platform at Reach Capital. Districts were already “preparing the chopping block for tools and services” that were nice to have but no longer necessary. 

Some districts also just prefer to manage their own tutoring programs. 

“If you look at the districts [that] have succeeded in scaling tutoring the most, all of those have owned a lot of the process internally,” said Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a Georgetown University . She cited Baltimore City, Guilford County, North Carolina, and Nashville as examples. “Districts are increasingly focused on the relational part of tutoring. It can be virtual or in person, but it’s someone who has a face and a name and that the kid knows.” 

The surprise isn’t that FEV Tutor is a “casualty” of the fiscal cliff, she said. “But certainly, nobody expected them to shut down on a Saturday in the middle of the school year when they have active customers and employees.”

FEV Tutor did not respond to an email requesting comment. A red banner at the top of its home page says the company “ceased operations” on Jan. 25. 

The news clearly confused some parents. In response to an announcement on Facebook, some families in Harford County, Maryland, blamed the district and wondered if officials knew weeks ago that services would end so suddenly. Another wrote, “There’s clearly a mismanagement of money somewhere.” 

On the district’s , officials apologized for the disruption, saying they could not guarantee they would be able to “find or implement a comparable solution at this time.” 

Marguerite Roza, the director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said she hasn’t seen other pandemic-era vendors face such a dramatic end, but predicted “there will be more in the coming months.”

Return on investment

Software industry veterans Anirudh Baheti and Ryan Patenaude founded FEV Tutor in 2008, well before the pandemic. According to GovSpend, a data company, annual sales didn’t top $1 million until 2018. By 2021, as districts began spending relief funds, sales jumped to over $6.3 million. 

In 2022, Alpine Investors, a private equity firm, acquired the company, and Patenaude said in a press release that he was excited about the “next stage of FEV’s growth.” Jim Tormey, an executive with Alpine, stepped in as CEO until Overfelt took over in 2023. 

FEV’s work in Ector and Duval County, Florida, was also part of an innovative arrangement known as outcomes-based contracting. The company didn’t just deliver tutoring; it promised better results for more money, and offered to take a pay cut if students didn’t make progress. 

Such deals piqued the tutoring world’s interest in recent years as policymakers increasingly called for evidence that relief funds weren’t going to waste. Cohen, who featured FEV’s work last year in a FutureEd , wrote in a commentary that the concept could help ensure districts “get the best return on their investment and help build a culture of performance in public education.”

FEV Tutor further evolved last year when it announced a new AI-enhanced platform, Tutor CoPilot. The tool makes tutors more effective by giving them guiding questions to ask students. In a , the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University, which studies tutoring models, found that when less-experienced tutors used the AI support, student math scores increased an average of 9 percentage points. 

But that breakthrough apparently wasn’t enough to turn business around.

In his note to the company, Overfelt said he and the board of directors had “explored every possible avenue to secure FEV Tutor’s future,” but that talks with additional investors had “reached their end.”

Since FEV was on a pay-as-you-go contract, Adkins, in Ector, said the district wasn’t worried about losing money.

But FEV employees are suddenly out of a job. A customer service manager who once taught in the Las Vegas-area Clark County schools posted on LinkedIn that she was . And Jen Mendelsohn, CEO of Braintrust Tutors, said she spent Monday interviewing former FEV employees.

Many, she said, “have long-term district relationships nationwide and are looking for ways to ensure academic continuity for their students.” 

When Penny Schwinn resigned as Tennessee’s education chief in 2023, she acknowledged that culture war battles over race and gender had interfered with efforts to catch students up after the pandemic.

“I see it as extraneous politics, and my job is to educate kids,” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ at the time.

Now she’s up for the second highest education post in the Trump administration, and advocates hope she’ll keep the spotlight on student achievement, particularly literacy — even as the new president promises to amp up conflicts she’s previously sidestepped.

Already, questions about her conservative bonafides prompted an on X Tuesday from right-wing activist Chris Rufo. Rufo said he met with members of Trump’s education team Monday and asked Schwinn to address “criticisms circulating on the Right” about her tenure in Tennessee. In an attempt to shore up support for the nominee, he posted that she vowed to “shut down the terrible programs at the Department of Education, fight critical race theory, gender cultism, and DEI in America’s schools, and support new initiatives on school choice and classical education.”

Among supporters, Schwinn is primarily known for pushing the academic needle forward following the devastating effects of pandemic lockdowns in Tennessee. As commissioner under Republican Gov. Bill Lee, she used COVID relief funds to launch a statewide tutoring program and has been credited with revamping instruction to incorporate the science of reading. 

“This gives me hope that the Trump Administration wants to play a constructive role in addressing learning loss and improving our schools,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Unlike Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to lead the department, Schwinn has been a teacher and also held top education positions in Delaware and Texas. Supporters call her a smart pick at a time when student performance hasn’t fully recovered from the pandemic.

Jim Blew, who co-founded the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute and served in the education department during the first Trump administration, called her “hardworking, very well-informed and savvy,” and said her experience would be a “complement to Linda McMahon’s strengths.”

Still, some have their doubts. Democrats dislike her strong support for charter schools, while some Republicans pointed to a pandemic plan to conduct well-being checks on children in their homes as an example of government overreach. 

Schwinn directed an interview request to a department spokesperson, who said she wouldn’t be available to reporters prior to her confirmation. 

Thomas Toch, director of FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank, called Schwinn a “pragmatic Republican” who was able to navigate “relationships with deep-red state leaders frequently more interested in leveraging education for political purposes than improving opportunities and outcomes for students.” 

“She supports school choice,” he said. “But she recognizes that school choice policies should include creating high-quality choices in public education — where 90% of the nation’s students attend school.”

Those who think Trump is serious about closing the Education Department might find themselves disappointed, Toch added. He said it’s unlikely Schwinn would be interested in the job if that was the objective.

Among many positions she’s held since leaving her post as commissioner, Schwinn has served as an unpaid fellow for FutureEd. In late 2023, she participated in by the organization, calling her work in Tennessee addressing stagnant reading scores “a moral imperative.”

The state requires districts to screen students for reading difficulties and use a phonics-based curriculum. After it passed a in 2021, roughly 30,000 teachers received in the science of reading. 

Amid pushback, Schwinn implemented follow-up legislation that requires third graders to meet state reading expectations or risk being held back. Facing opposition from parents and advocates, Gov. Lee later to let parents and educators decide whether students should be retained.

Recent state test data shows Tennessee students continue to . Thirty-eight percent of students met expectations in reading last school year, continuing to exceed the pre-pandemic level of 34%. 

“Superintendents are growth,” said Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville PROPEL, a parent advocacy group focused on literacy. “That wouldn’t have been possible if they didn’t have Penny pushing school districts to change the way that they were delivering literacy instruction.”

Results of the state’s tutoring effort, meanwhile, have been mixed. In the Nashville district, tutoring accounted for only a small increase in reading scores and had no effect on math performance, . 

‘Questionable behaviors’

Critics of Schwinn’s record in Texas and Tennessee point to state contracts and said she doesn’t exemplify Trump’s promises to downsize government and protect parental rights. 

While she was a deputy under Commissioner Mike Morath from 2016 to 2019, the Texas Education Agency signed a $4.4 million, no-bid contract with SPEDx, a Georgia software startup, despite Schwinn having a “professional relationship” with someone at the company, according to a . With the goal of improving services, the agency gave the company records on hundreds of special education students for analysis without parents’ consent.

The state ultimately , lost $2 million and had to pay another $200,000 to who was after filing a complaint about the deal. Citing “questionable behaviors,” a on special education resurfaced the matter in 2023, calling it an effort to “data-mine” private student information. In Tennessee, lawmakers questioned another for the state’s voucher program.

Regarding SPEDx, Schwinn said at the time that she “deeply believed” the company was the only one offering the service, and in Tennessee, she said she was in a rush to roll out the state’s voucher program when she granted the contract to ClassWallet without seeking other proposals.

Local and attacked a state , never executed, to check in on kids during pandemic school closures. “Our children were where they had always been. Homeschools were not closed down,” said Tiffany Boyd, who runs Free Your Children, a Christian homeschool organization. “We thought that she was a threat to Tennessee then. We now think that she’s a threat to the entire United States.” 

But the idea with public school parents either. Tennessee Rep. Mark White, a Republican, was among the lawmakers who fielded complaints from those who worried officials would second-guess their parenting decisions.

Even though the state issued a  announcing “monthly child well-being calls,” Schwinn told Rufo she never endorsed the plan, according to his tweet. About a week after unveiling it, she  that she “missed the mark on communication” and  there was no “big brother intent.”

Despite the problems, White has no reservations about Schwinn joining the Trump administration. In an email to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, he said she had his “complete endorsement” and is “grateful that Tennessee has a direct connection with the federal Department of Education.”

For someone whose resume has only grown over the past 18 months, joining the administration could be limiting. Schwinn holds high-level positions with an and a , and had a brief stint at the . In May, she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ in an email that she was working to launch a nonprofit focused on “urgency around student outcomes.” She’s also listed as for the conservative Heritage Foundation’s program to train future school board members. 

As deputy, “she will help improve the implementation” of the policies Trump and McMahon push for, said Dan Goldhaber, director of the . He noted her “good reputation,” but said she “isn’t likely to change the direction” of the department.

But with National Assessment of Educational Progress scores set for release next week — and many — Toch said her background will be valuable.

“The administration is going to have to address them. Blaming the Biden administration is going to work for only so long,” he said. “Given Schwinn’s experience and expertise, she’s going to have a voice … on education issues.”

Historically, the majority of this funding was only available to students who were low income, had special needs or attended poorly performing public schools. 

Over the past three years, that’s shifted: Today, at least 33 states offer private school choice programs, and of those 12 are “universal,” meaning any student, regardless of income or need, can apply for government funding to subsidize private, religious and — in some cases — home schools. 

Comprehensive analysis of the scale of these initiatives and their implications — both for students and state budgets — has been sparse. But a released earlier this month by , a research think tank based at Georgetown’s School of Public Policy, looks to change that. 

Policy Director Liz Cohen and analyst Bella DiMarco studied the evolution of established or emerging universal programs during the 2023-24 school year across eight states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. 

Their research comes on the eve of an election where school choice measures are on the ballot in three additional states and when disagreement continues to spark over whether these programs give freedom and choice to families who have been historically locked out of private schooling or are part of a larger movement meant to undermine and defund public schools. 

FutureEd’s major finding about how universal choice has played out so far? “Policy design really matters,” Cohen said, in an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

While all of the studied programs are universal in that anyone can apply, whether families end up actually receiving money, how much they receive and what accountability measures the participating schools are held to varies greatly state by state. 

They calculated that in total, 569,000 students received subsidies across these states, representing 55% of the students attending private schools with public funding and costing taxpayers an estimated $4 billion. About 40% of the nation’s 50 million elementary and secondary students are now eligible.

Here are five key takeaways.

“Universal” is not necessarily universal, and no two states’ policies look the same. 

“We talk about [universal programs] as such a monolithic thing,” said DiMarco. “I expected there to be more similarities between the programs and to see more similarities in the data. But that just wasn’t necessarily the case.” 

In Ohio for example, families receive funding on a sliding scale based on need, private schools can’t charge low-income families more than what they receive from the state and participating private schools must use the same graduation requirements.

On the other end of the spectrum, in Florida and Arizona no student who applies for funding is turned down and participating private schools don’t need to be accredited. 

“If you listen to the sort of politically charged descriptions of these initiatives you get one fairly stilted perspective— both from proponents and opponents of these,” said Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “And when you look at them piece by piece, there’s a good bit of daylight between the arrangements from one city to the next.”

But there are a few overarching themes, some of which shouldn’t come as a surprise.

All states give participating families similar amounts of money, with the average award amount coming in at around $7,000, which is approximately 90% to 100% of state per-pupil funding. 

Most states require some sort of accountability testing — but not all. And most of the students who received the funding across all eight states were already attending private schools.

For example in Arkansas, 64% of students who received funds through the Education Freedom Act in its first year, the 2023-24 school year, were already enrolled in private schools. The majority were students with disabilities. 

“So much of the attention in general has been paid to the fact that the majority of kids are already in private school,” said Cohen. “But that’s actually the expected outcome if you are giving money to kids to go to private school, and anyone can get it.”

She said the bigger question moving forward is examining if that pattern will persist beyond the first wave of funding.

Josh Cowen, education policy expert and author of said he doesn’t anticipate the demographics of participating students to shift much over time, meaning he isn’t expecting an exodus of low-income students from struggling public schools to private school alternatives..

“Put me down for projecting that the next version of this [report] is going to find something very similar and even more stark… [because] no policy that isn’t directly targeted toward at-risk children or families, will remain primarily benefiting at-risk children or families.“

The income level of participating families is murkier than people think: Well-to-do families are signing up, but so are more modest ones.

While these programs continue to serve predominantly lower- and middle-income families, the researchers found that participation among higher-income families increased last year, in every state where eligibility expanded and data was available.

“One of the big sort of headlines you keep seeing around these programs is that it’s all affluent families,” said Cohen. “And I just think the nuance to that is that that’s not actually accurate.”

While it’s true that there are many more affluent families than in previous means-tested programs, there are still significant numbers of lower-income families who are entering these programs. She pointed to Florida where 30% of families participating are low income. 

DiMarco said they saw a lot of middle-income families taking advantage of the funds who were “sort of just above the line” under previous, means-tested programs.

Impacts of funding on state budgets remain unclear.

Because the majority of families who took advantage of this funding were not coming from public schools — and therefore not bringing their per pupil public funding with them — these subsidies represent a new state-level cost.

“They’re new expenses,” said Cohen, “which could ultimately down the road — if state lawmakers don’t really think this through — end up [putting] states in a position where they have to say, ‘We’re not going to build this highway … because we have to pay the bill on this private school choice thing.’”

Goals of the programs are rarely — if ever — clearly stated, making accountability tricky. 

Some states, like Arizona and Oklahoma, have no standardized testing requirements or other performance metrics, making it, “nearly impossible to gauge how much learning is taking place under the state’s private school choice programs,” according to the report.

Other states do have more stringent requirements, although Florida is the only state the researchers studied which has mandated funding to evaluate academic performance of participating students.

“The step it feels like a lot of these states skipped is identifying a clear goal for the program and then a clear metric of how you’ll know if you achieved your goal,” said Cohen. “And without stating those things up front, what are we even trying to measure?”

Malkus sees more of an effort to track student outcomes, though he emphasized additional data would help parents make better-informed choices. 

“I don’t think the testing requirements are as strict as some people would like them,” he said, “but the idea that there’s zero accountability for these isn’t true either. It’s somewhere in the messy middle.”

The proposed Academic Acceleration and Achievement Grants, part of the administration’s for fiscal year 2025, would target three strategies Education Secretary Miguel Cardona highlighted in January — addressing chronic absenteeism, offering high-impact tutoring and extending learning afterschool and during the summer. 

In a call with reporters, an education department official said the competitive grant program would help put the recovery efforts districts launched with relief dollars “on an even faster track and sustain the improvements that states have put into place.” But to make space for the administration’s priorities, leaders are recommending a few cuts, including a $40 million reduction to a program that provides start-up funds for charter schools.

The announcement of the grant program follows the showing most students still haven’t caught up to pre-pandemic performance levels. But with the current fiscal year budget still delayed by partisan over spending for defense and the IRS, advocates acknowledged that passing a substantial new program will be tough.

The proposal will face “the political realities of heading into an election year and the limitations of the budget,” said Nakia Towns, chief operating officer of Accelerate, a national initiative funding tutoring research and programs. The organization’s leaders began discussing how to provide new funds for tutoring efforts with department officials and the White House last fall, Towns said. But she added that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed concerns about students struggling to catch up.

“Everybody has been in agreement that kids still need more support, schools still need more support for learning recovery,” she said. “Now it’s about what actually gets over the goal posts in the budget process.”

Overall, the Education Department is asking for $82 billion for next fiscal year — a $3.1 billion increase. The proposal keeps spending in line with the caps enacted last year in a to avoid the federal government defaulting on its financial obligations. In his comments, Cardona contrasted the Biden administration’s track record on education with that of his presidential challenger Donald Trump and his Republican colleagues in Congress. 

“This is a budget request that comes on top of three years of historic investments proposed by President Biden and delivered with support from many in Congress,” he said. “It blows the Trump budgets out of the water.”

It includes $18.6 billion for Title I, a $200 million increase over the current 2023 level; a $25 million preschool grant program; and $14.4 billion for special education, also a $200 million increase.

But to keep spending within the federal spending limit, the department targeted the Charter Schools Program, recommending a $40 million cut to the $440 million program. In response, Eric Paisner, acting president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said the budget proposal “falls disappointingly short of prioritizing public charter schools and public educational options for parents who are looking for something better.”

The National Parents Union also criticized the move, saying the program “has played a vital role in empowering communities to establish public, accountable schools tailored to the unique needs of students.”

But the advocacy group welcomed the new competitive grant program, calling it part of the administration’s “deep-seated commitment to not only recovering from the setbacks of recent years, but also to advancing our educational system to new heights.”

The proposal is unlikely to receive a friendly reception in the House, where the Republican majority has frequently reminded the public of the harmful impact of long school closures, particularly in blue states and cities with strong teachers unions. During a , some members suggested districts had either or have little to show for the historic investment.

“I think it unlikely that congressional Republicans would want to shower another $8 billion on school systems,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Schools took far too long to open, express any urgency about absenteeism or learning loss, or start trying to convince the public and policymakers that the dollars were being spent effectively.”

In a statement, North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, who chairs the House education committee, said the budget plan “would gobble up more taxpayer dollars without any shred of accountability.”

Charting ‘a path forward’

Towns, former deputy superintendent for the Gwinnett County Public Schools, near Atlanta, noted that the American Rescue Plan, which required districts to spend 20% of their funds to address learning loss, lacked requirements to ensure the dollars were spent on effective programs. 

Accelerate, however, has urged the administration to ask for more data from districts so they can demonstrate that “kids are getting the intensity and consistency of tutoring that we know is needed in order for it to actually make a difference,” she said. 

Many districts used relief funds to implement strong tutoring programs, added Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University. In January, FutureEd released her report highlighting some of those efforts, including Teach for America’s Ignite program, which this year has over 1,500 college students tutoring 3,500 elementary and middle school students in 21 states. 

She also noted Texas’s Ector County Independent School District, which implemented a contract that rewards tutoring providers with higher pay if students make significant progress.

“There is so much great tutoring happening already and I would love to see us learn from what’s working right now as we chart a path forward,” Cohen said.

One sign that districts are more focused on results for students is the growth of , a technology company that offers an online platform for districts to store tutoring data, such as the number of sessions scheduled and whether students attend. The business received a from Accelerate in 2022. 

Some states and districts initially signed contracts with online, on-demand tutoring providers, but research later showed that students often didn’t use the services. Pearl founder John Failla said he’s noticed greater interest in districts using models that experts recommend.

“All of our data is pointing towards states and districts wanting to run their own programs with their own tutors … versus working with online vendors,” he said.

Almost 450 districts now use the system, with the number of sessions growing from about 13,600 in February 2023 to almost 80,000 a year later.

Cohen added that GOP-led states are among those that have made tutoring and summer learning programs a high priority. Tennessee launched its tutoring program in 2020, which is expected to reach 200,000 students by this summer. And Alabama has concentrated recovery efforts during the summer, with .

As they weigh the president’s budget request, Cohen said she hopes “Republicans choose to consider the success we’ve seen in many red states.”

Yet passing state legislation is only the first step. The challenge now is to translate these policies into effective classroom practices, expanding instruction based on the science of reading in the nation’s vast, decentralized system of more than 13,000 school districts. A new , The Reading Revolution: How States Are Scaling Literacy Reform, tells the story of how Mississippi, Tennessee and other states at the vanguard of the reading revolution have redesigned reading instruction and raised student achievement in thousands of public schools through bold, state-level leadership.

These states have addressed every aspect of early literacy, from how teachers and prospective teachers are trained to the curriculum they use, how students are assessed and whether children are retained rather than promoted to the next grade. Taken together, their experiences offer a blueprint for how other states can successfully move from legislation to actual shifts in instruction and student outcomes.

First, states such as Mississippi and Tennessee, recognized that they needed a multi-year strategy, rather than a piecemeal approach, to changing literacy instruction. This included aligning everything from teacher licensure requirements to instructional materials to interventions for struggling students to the science of reading.

Second, they invested in initial statewide training for educators, followed by ongoing support as teachers applied what they learned in their classrooms. The Mississippi Department of Education selects and trains literacy coaches and assigns them to targeted schools, where they work with teachers on early reading instruction and do “Literacy Learning Walks” through classrooms with school administrators to observe lessons and provide feedback. The Tennessee Department of Education created regional networks of districts to engage in monthly classroom walkthroughs and to share best practices, including coaching on how to give teachers feedback. The state’s Best for All website also posts videos of teachers’ early literacy practices, so that they can learn from one another.

Third, Mississippi and Tennessee ensure that teachers and students get high-quality instructional tools grounded in the science of reading. Tennessee adopted a list of high-quality English language arts materials in 2020 and requires districts to choose from among them when devising an early literacy plan, which must be submitted for state approval. The state also developed a free, optional Tennessee Foundational Skills Curriculum for pre-kindergarten through grade two. Mississippi adopted a recommended list of high-quality ELA materials in 2021.

Fourth, states like Mississippi and Tennessee use classroom observations and rubrics to determine how well teachers are implementing the new reading strategies, so district and state officials can identify areas for improvement, or areas where teachers might need additional training or more resources.

Fifth, to identify children who need extra help, these states screen early elementary students three times a year, looking specifically for dyslexia or other potential reading difficulties. In 31 states, parents must be notified if their child has reading difficulties. Ten states require families to be involved in developing an individual reading plan for their child. In Louisiana, for example,  within 30 days of being identified as having below-grade-level literacy skills, students must have an individual reading improvement plan created by the teacher, principal, other pertinent school personnel, and the parent or legal guardian.

Sixth, struggling students are provided with interventions aligned to the curriculum used during core instruction, so that what they learn during tutoring, summer programs or before- and after-school programs connects with what happens in their classroom. Tennessee, for example, ensures that all tutors hired through are trained in the science of reading and provides them with a foundational literacy skills curriculum for grades 1 to 3. States’ primary focus should be on preventing students from failing reading in third grade rather than retaining those who are not successful. Students who are retained should receive individualized, evidence-based supports, not just more of the same.

Seventh, states can use their regulatory authority to prod teacher preparation programs to align with the science of reading, as Tennessee, Colorado, and Mississippi have done. Teacher candidates should demonstrate that they understand the science of reading, how to teach reading and how to select and use high-quality English language arts materials.

Finally, states need dedicated funding to build and sustain the infrastructure needed to support the science of reading, because these changes will not happen overnight.

For decades, teachers, through no fault of their own, were handed a faulty playbook about how to teach young children to read. Turning those practices around will require intentional and sustained action on the part of states. But the experience of early state leaders shows that it can be done.

Then, in her final year at Tarrant County College, Valdes saw a flier for a 12-month program called that would let her earn a teaching degree while being paid to serve as a classroom trainee. The Texas Tech University program was designed to address the state’s growing demand for teachers and widespread dissatisfaction with instructors coming through alternative certification programs that provided little classroom experience.

Texas Tech’s program allows community college graduates like Valdes to earn both a bachelor’s degree and a teaching certificate by combining online courses with a year-long paid classroom residency working under an experienced mentor. 

Today, a year after completing the program with honors, Valdes is a dual-language third grade math and science teacher at T.A. Sims Elementary School in Fort Worth. As a bilingual educator of color, she is a much sought-after hire in Fort Worth and beyond.

A of have found that when students of color have teachers of color, their attendance improves, disciplinary infractions decline, and academic achievement and college enrollment rise. For all students, having a diverse teaching force strengthens confidence in their own abilities and improves racial attitudes. Yet, while students of color comprise more than 50% of public school enrollment nationally — a share expected to grow steadily in the years ahead — nearly 80% of teachers are white. In many states, this lack of diversity means students frequently attend schools and districts that do not employ a single educator of color.

A new FutureEd of identified a range of programs, like the Tech Teach residency, that offer promising strategies for making the profession more representative of the students in the nation’s schools.

Setting measurable goals for recruiting, training and hiring candidates of color is a key first step. That includes publicizing goals and policymakers’ progress toward achieving them at the state, district and school levels. The federal government can contribute by requiring states to report on the racial and ethnic diversity of students who complete teacher-preparation programs. 

Rather than waiting to begin recruiting teachers of color at the college level, some districts are encouraging middle and high schoolers to explore teaching careers. The , for example, partners with districts to create high school that offer prospective educators a three-year curriculum centered on the Black experience. In Philadelphia, that means high school juniors and seniors can take college courses and graduate with an associate degree in education along with a diploma. 

There’s also an opportunity to tap into local talent via Grow Your Own programs that provide pathways for paraprofessionals and other workers in the community to get the training and experience they need to become teachers. California’s program, for example, has helped more than 2,000 teachers’ aides or paraprofessionals become teachers, nearly half of them Latino. Some programs take the form of teacher residences — like the one Valdes participated in — and apprenticeships, which are particularly promising for candidates of color, as they can receive extensive clinical preparation and earn a salary while they learn to teach. 

The National Council on Teacher Quality has nearly 90 programs that are helping potential educators of color navigate a substantial barrier to the profession: state licensing exams. Candidates of color typically fail these tests at much higher rates than other teaching candidates. But at these programs, there’s little or no racial disparity in first-time pass rates, thanks to the support they provide to help candidates fill gaps in their content knowledge. Massachusetts is piloting a that lets candidates substitute another approved standardized test for the state’s general knowledge exam for aspiring teachers. It also permits candidates who come very close to the passing score on subject-specific tests to submit an essay to demonstrate content knowledge.

Making a diverse teacher workforce an explicit priority in school district hiring also makes a difference. Highline Public Schools in Washington state, where more than half of the 18,700 students are Black and Latino, implemented an interview process designed to elicit candidates’ beliefs about teaching disenfranchised students and to identify implicit bias. Together with other steps, the strategy tripled Highline’s new hires of color from 12% in 2014-15 to 36% in 2022-23. 

But it’s not enough to hire more teachers of color if they don’t stay, and many don’t. Attrition is significantly higher among Black teachers than whites and slightly higher among Latino teachers than whites. Leadership opportunities and clear career pathways for teachers of color can help address the problem. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has launched a fellowship program, , to increase the percentage of superintendents of color over a decade. Another strategy is to connect teachers of color with peers, both locally and nationally, through paid, mentorship and professional learning opportunities. Highline Public Schools, for example, has created eight teacher affinity groups dedicated to racial equity and pays teachers to participate in them.

A comprehensive approach to increasing the percentage of teachers of color in the nation’s schools, pursuing diversity throughout the teacher pipeline, yields the strongest results. That requires a wide-ranging commitment among educators and education leaders. “Institutions of color and people of color are [often] burdened with solving the problem, one they didn’t create,” Anthony Graham, provost of Winston-Salem State University, said in an interview. Addressing teacher diversity, he said, needs to be “our problem collectively.”

And the way the government has distributed the funds — through a formula that targets high-poverty schools — left some communities hit hard by the pandemic with insufficient funding to offset learning declines, wrote Kenneth Shores of the University of Delaware and Matthew Steinberg of George Mason University in Virginia in by the American Educational Research Association.

The researchers push for greater accountability, calling a lack of reporting on how districts are using the funds a “policy failure.” When officials learned which districts participated in remote learning longer, they could have made adjustments, Steinberg said.

“There weren’t efforts in real time … to update the distribution of this aid in ways that would try to maximize its reach to the students and communities that would need it the most,” he said.

In order to build public trust, they recommend that the U.S. Department of Education at least collect data on how a representative sample of districts is allocating the funds. 

National test scores set for release later this month are expected to further drive home the impact of school closures on students’ academic progress and spark more debate about whether districts are making wise choices with the unprecedented windfall. The AERA report echoes growing demands from parents and policymakers for greater transparency from districts. have asked the department for “insight into how schools are using federal dollars to help America’s students catch up,” and parent groups are seeking training in school finance to track the money. The researchers recommend that officials add incentives to get districts to prioritize academic interventions over projects “such as athletic fields.”

The most recent round of funding, the American Rescue Plan, requires districts to spend a minimum of 20% of their funds to address learning loss.

“But nobody had to stop there,” said Heather Tolley-Bauer, co-founder of Watching the Funds-Cobb, a parent-led group monitoring spending in the Cobb County School District, north of Atlanta. The organization is among those that have received from the National Parents Union to track the funds. “When we look at the things they could have spent the money on and the things they did spend the money on, it’s frustrating.”

Her leading example is the $9.7 million the district spent on “Iggy” hand-rinsing machines that dispense a mixture of water and ozone. The company’s points to studies that say the machines kill COVID, but disagree and others say there’s . But even if the technology is effective at killing the virus, the devices at some schools are inaccessible, with plastic over the openings, Tolley-Bauer said. (A spokesperson for 30e Scientific, the company that makes the machines, explained that some of them have experienced “vandalism by unknown individuals.”) 

She understands the district was “in a hot hurry” to address the crisis, but said parents feel excluded from funding decisions. 

“I’m not surprised that the federal government didn’t put a lot of parameters around [the money],” she said. “It would help if the schools would …make very strategic decisions that would impact students positively for years to come.”

Some districts have participated in “halftime reviews” to assess spending patterns, said Jonathan Travers, managing partner at Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that helps districts resolve budget challenges. In some cases, districts are waiting two to three months for approval of any changes to their spending plans. Districts were able to spend the money quicker on bulk purchases and HVAC upgrades, while tutoring and other student services have taken longer to implement, he said.

Phyllis Jordan, associate director of FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank that has been tracking the spending, argued that the department has held districts accountable by requiring them to submit plans for the third round of funds. 

“There is a level of oversight that you haven’t had before,” she said. “You at least have to articulate how you plan to spend it.”

And the department recently proposed that all states participate in a that previously was optional. While it won’t focus just on COVID funds, that spending will be included. 

Impact on Black students 

To reach the $700 billion estimate, researchers drew from multiple data sources and existing studies. One was a that used assessment data to pinpoint how much of a district’s budget would need to be replaced to make up for missed instruction. In high-poverty districts that were in remote learning for much of the 2020-21 school year, it would be over 40% of their budget.

The researchers on the earlier study, led by Dan Goldhaber of the Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research and Thomas Kane of Harvard University, concluded districts would need to spend all of their relief funds to address learning loss, not just 20%. 

But Shores and Steinberg think that estimate could be too low because it might not account for learning loss among students that weren’t tested and it doesn’t reflect how families and other “non-school inputs” contribute to student achievement. , Steinberg said, shows that student performance depends considerably on what is “happening outside of school.”

Their estimates range from a low of $325 billion to make up for missed instruction to a high of $930 billion, with $700 billion roughly in the middle.

Goldhaber said their estimates could be too high, but he noted that either way, the education system has never faced a challenge like this.

“We’re trying to do across the country what has only been done at a small scale,” he said. 

Shores and Steinberg also draw attention to the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Black and Hispanic students, regardless of whether they come from low-income families. 

The Education Department’s survey of schools, for example, showed that while the vast majority were open by the end of the 2020-21 school year, the rate of Black and Hispanic students attending full, in-person learning still fell at least 20 percentage points below that of white students. Asian students were the least likely to attend in-person.

Additionally, released last year from researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University, said the racial unrest that broke out during the first summer of the pandemic contributed to higher levels of trauma among Black students and families and that schools were “ill-equipped” to support them.

Distributing the funds through the existing Title I formula, which some argue is across the country, resulted in less funding for districts where the disruption to learning may still have been extensive, Shores and Steinberg wrote. 

But Goldhaber cautioned that “it’s easy to be critical retrospectively. When you’re trying to get money out the door quickly, it’s reasonable to use existing vehicles.”

Shores and Steinberg compare COVID relief packages with the federal stimulus package passed to combat the effects of the Great Recession. There’s “not a single study,” they wrote, that demonstrates the impact of that 2009 stimulus package on student learning.

Shores said he’s been disappointed by the “lack of creativity” in directing COVID relief funds. But it’s not too late to change course, particularly when it comes to spending money from the American Rescue Plan, they said.

With roughly a quarter of the funds spent, Steinberg said there’s still time to redirect the money toward tutoring or other interventions that “seem to have potentially positive returns.”

Megan Monsour knew she was taking a risk last year when she pulled her two sons out of the Wichita, Kansas, district and enrolled them in Green Gate, a nature-focused microschool. Not only did she fret over her sons’ exposure to COVID-19, but wondered whether they’d get the attention they needed for persistent reading difficulties.

But then Green Gate arranged for a dyslexia specialist to tutor the boys during the school day — something the district wouldn’t do even though the Monsours were willing to pay for it.

“Although we believe in and want to support public schools, it was frustrating that there was no flexibility to have the tutoring I wanted,” Monsour said. Now, after a year in the program, she said their reading has improved. “I also like the independence and autonomy Green Gate teaches. They have a lot of time outside and I think children need more recess and chances to have hands-on learning.”

The Monsour boys are two of the roughly who left the Wichita district last year and among thousands across the country who aren’t returning to public schools this fall. While the pandemic provided the initial spark behind the growth of pods — and remains an important catalyst — parents say their reasons for joining have expanded as the concept has taken root. Those reasons are as varied as resistance to mask mandates, a desire for culturally relevant education and frustration with services their children were receiving in public schools. As the movement enters its second school year, many parents who formed small pods last fall are also recognizing their limitations and are now linking up with larger, more-established networks of homeschoolers for support.

“Now that they have a year under their belt, they are starting to find their legs,” said Kija Gray, a coach who advises mostly Black families in Detroit that have left public schools for homeschooling and pods. A year ago, she said parents were “really super nervous” about their decisions. Now she hears more excitement in their voices. “What I think they found was community.”

In July, Tyton Partners, a consulting organization, released on the durability of such alternative schooling models. Of the 2,500 parents responding, three-quarters of those who chose pods last school year — like the Monsours — planned to stick with them. The authors estimated that enrollment in pods and microschools, which are larger but still offer personalized instruction, would reach 1.5 million this fall.

But some of the skepticism that initially greeted the movement remains. The costs and logistics involved in maintaining pods, especially for families struggling financially or parents returning to work outside of the home, continue to present challenges.

“They’re not likely to scale substantially post-pandemic,” said Thomas Toch, director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd. Pods, he said, were a “rational response” to school closures, but “free public schools, we learned …, play a central role in most families’ lives, their very uneven quality notwithstanding.”

Critics of the pod movement that they would ultimately hurt public schools by taking away student funding. But some districts this fall have tried to reverse the trend and lure back those who fled public schools last year. In the , Virginia district, staff members have made phone calls and sent postcards, texts and emails to those who left for homeschooling or private schools. In Wichita, the district contacted 115 families, including those in pods or microschools. Half have returned, said spokeswoman Susan Arensman.

from EdChoice and Morning Consult shows participation and interest in pods peaked last fall and since then have held constant at about a third of parents. About a quarter of those in pods have left their public schools and about a third who say they are interested in joining one would do so as well. Those who are Black, Hispanic, Democrats, live in urban areas and in the West are among the most likely to participate in pods, while parents who are white, Republican and low-income are among the least likely to show interest, their polling shows.

Privately and publicly funded efforts to lower the costs of pods and microschools are available for those who can’t afford the option. Without such efforts, concerns about pods being a choice only for the more affluent will continue, the Tyton authors warned.

‘Centered on the virus’

School closures drove parents to form pods last year so they could spread the responsibility for teaching — or paying for a teacher — across multiple families. Now some of the restrictions schools put in place to avoid closures are also influencing their decisions.

“The first question I get is, ‘Do you mask?’” said Karla Withrow, who runs EarthChild Explorers, an outdoor program serving preschoolers and grades K-1 in a large Riverside County park in southern California. She doesn’t require masks, and the students are always outside, where transmission is less of a risk. A former preschool director who trained other teachers in San Diego, Withrow weaves nature into her curriculum and recruited her husband, a hot air balloon pilot, to give lessons on weather and wind.

The parents that seek out her program, she said, share a lot of the concerns she had last year when she decided to homeschool her kindergartner.

“I just felt in my heart that classrooms right now aren’t education- and student-centered,” she said. “I think they’re centered on the virus.”

Far from Southern California, on a five-acre farm outside St. Paul, Minnesota, Diane Smith formed a pod with two other families from the White Bear Lake Area Schools. A former fifth-grade teacher in a Catholic school, Smith teaches the students biology and they pooled their money to hire an Algebra II teacher. They’ve taken boat tours on the St. Croix River to study the region’s many bodies of water, and one student’s father, a medical researcher, helped the group dissect a pig’s heart for a science lesson.

But this fall, the parents realized that their children — mostly in high school — need more academic instruction than they can provide. The students are taking some classes from a large homeschool co-op. Smith said the parents have been “blown away” by the support they’ve received from the homeschool community. “Clearly, there is a movement,” she said. “You really aren’t alone.”

Opposition to the district’s mask mandate and restrictions such as keeping students in cohorts to eat lunch are among parents’ reasons for leaving the district. focusing on privilege and racial oppression also played a role. Sixth graders in a choir class were asked to consider how it would feel to be in a privileged group, which included being white, male, Christian or heterosexual, or in a targeted group, including being a person of color, female, Muslim, or LGBT. Smith said, “I thought, ‘Is this the direction we’re going?’”

‘A total place of liberation’

Perhaps one sign of pods’ staying power is that they’ve appealed to parents on all sides of the nation’s frequently polarized debates over race and discrimination in schools. Torlecia Bates decided to pull 10-year-old Kaden and 8-year-old Kaylee out of the Louisa County Public Schools, near Richmond, Virginia, last year when her worries over schools’ COVID-19 mitigation procedures were replaced with concerns about the impact of racial unrest on her children.

“I had a reality check,” she said. “I thought, ‘I have these cute brown kids, but will the world see them as a threat?’”

She began homeschooling and meeting up with other former public school families for playdates. She tagged along on field trips with , a homeschool group that serves Black and multiracial families. This year, she’s joined the group, where her children get help with math, visit museums, go kayaking and “get real-life coping skills,” she said. She teaches them on the other days, and then works the night shift at home for a banking company.

Initially unsure about her decision to leave the district, she said she “went from a place of extreme anxiety, and not being sure if I would be able to measure up, to a total place of liberation.”

She’s also saving money. Bates used to spend $13,000 a year on child care, plus the cost of afterschool programs and activities. Now, she’s spending $250 per month for two days a week at the co-op.

Cultural Roots is among the programs receiving support from the , which launched last year to support nontraditional options like microschools. Some programs use the funds to provide scholarships, and those leading larger pods and co-ops frequently offer sliding fee scales for families.

The microschool concept has caught the attention of choice-supporting policymakers, such as Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican. He announced last month that he’s allocating $3.5 million to the , an advocacy organization, to launch microschools. And in Nevada, the city of North Las Vegas used federal relief funds and worked with a nonprofit to create the , which targets city employees and other frontline personnel.

“It’s almost like free private school,” said Maria Austad, a senior office assistant in the city’s public works department. Last year, she pulled her daughter Isabella, who has Asperger’s syndrome, out of the Clark County School District, where she was frequently getting in disciplinary trouble because of problems with social interaction.

Austad enrolled her daughter in the academy, where students use an online curriculum with help from on-site teaching assistants.

Others found that their local schools were the most sensible choice. Amber Besson, a mother of three who lives north of Wichita, put her youngest in Green Gate for kindergarten last year, while her two other children, 12 and 14, stayed with the Valley Center district’s distance learning program. Now it’s just easier to have everyone together.

“Spending an hour or more in the car before and after work didn’t put me home at a time where I was able to make the best of our evenings with all of our kids,” she said.

To put the movement in perspective, those who have been able to make pods work represent less than 3 percent of the overall K-12 population. But “even a small shift in the enrollment behavior of families can have a big effect on K-12 systems, especially once federal pandemic recovery funding runs dry,” said Alex Spurrier, a senior analyst at Bellwether Education Partners. He wrote about pods and microschools in “,” a report released with the Walton Family Foundation in August. He counted those joining pods and microschools among the 8.7 million students who changed schools between 2019-20 and 2020-21 for reasons other than a normal promotion to the next grade.

Katie Saiz, who co-founded the Green Gate program with her husband in 2008, tells callers her program is full. For years, they only served preschoolers out of their home, but come fall 2020, “there was this huge need in the community,” she said, adding that 97 percent of the families that joined last year because of the pandemic are back this fall.

When the Monsours joined, their third grader was ahead in math, but struggling in language arts. Now, his mother said, he’s become a more confident reader.

“It’s really cool when you are able to put a kid where they need to be,” Saiz said, “and don’t worry so much about where they should be.”

Lead Image: Art teacher Khalid Thompson leads students from the Cultural Roots Co-op on a tour of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. (Cultural Roots Co-op)

Amid back-to-school debates over vaccinations, mask requirements and the right lens for , the troubling lack of opportunities for many high school students to take advanced coursework they need for success in college and beyond has unfortunately fallen off the education policy radar.

Advanced coursework can include International Baccalaureate, dual high school-college enrollment or Advanced Placement courses, with AP being the most popular and widely available mechanism. Taking such courses helps students gain college credits while still in high school, earn admission to top colleges and flourish in the work world.

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Yet a recently released report from the Center for American Progress that Black, Indigenous and rural students were far more likely to attend schools offering fewer AP courses than schools attended by their white, Asian and suburban counterparts.

And even when students have similar access to AP courses, lower percentages of Black, Indigenous and rural students enroll in the courses and pass them. In high schools offering 18 or more AP courses, white students taking at least one AP exam had an average passing rate of 72 percent. For Black students in these circumstances, the average passing rate was 42 percent. Latino students are not experiencing the same gaps in access as other ethnic and racial groups, but they do have lower enrollment and pass rates.

This speaks to what many educators and advocates already understand: Equitable access and success in advanced coursework require more than availability, and there are policy investments that schools and districts can leverage to help students succeed in advanced courses.

The first is creating a national database on student participation and performance in advanced coursework (including dual-enrollment courses offered at local universities), disaggregated by race. Currently, no comprehensive national dataset exists for multiple dual enrollment options, and individual state report cards vary greatly in what is publicly reported.

Much of the research on advanced coursework, by default, is limited to AP participation and performance, because that is the only data that is easily aggregated, transparent and comparable among all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Future iterations of the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection should also report on IB and dual-enrollment participation and performance.

Another crucial investment is to remove entry barriers to AP and other advanced courses. and subjective gatekeeping measures have a way of creeping into the enrollment process for advanced courses through overreliance on teacher referrals or counselor recommendations. This often results in students being overlooked for enrollment in at the elementary school level and at the high school level.

Districts have succeeded in combating this through the use of universal screening for gifted-and-talented programs and automatic-enrollment or academic-acceleration policies for AP courses. Automatic-enrollment policies, in several states, require that students who meet benchmark proficiency levels on statewide examinations be automatically enrolled in the next-highest available class, including advanced courses, though they can opt out.

In addition to making sure students are properly identified for enrollment in advanced courses, it is important to ensure they are prepared to handle the content and demands of the coursework. That takes regular communication and lesson planning among elementary, middle and high school educators to map out common instructional vocabulary and concepts, known as .

Moreover, supporting students and teachers during their experiences in advanced courses is critical. One strategy that many states and districts embrace is to associated with taking an AP or IB exam. Additionally, some schools are experiencing success through creating , where junior and senior AP students advise and tutor younger high school students to make sure they are setting themselves up for success.

Finally, both teachers and students benefit immensely from the creation of regional and statewide . This can take different forms but usually involves time outside the regular school day when students and teachers can refine their skills, learn from experts and get real-time feedback on teaching and learning.

None of these strategies alone can surmount the stubborn and persistent inequities in participation and success in AP courses. But when done in concert and with dedicated leadership, they can help broaden access to and success in advanced coursework.

Roby Chatterji is a senior policy analyst for K-12 education at the Center for American Progress.

Students learning remotely missed the most days of school this year, according to from Connecticut. And students who were chronically absent in the fall were far more likely to keep missing school during the winter months.

The analysis, from the Connecticut Department of Education and advocacy group Attendance Works, shows that rates of chronic absence — defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year — were highest among students in low-income communities, English learners and students with disabilities. And the rates of poor attendance among Black and Hispanic students were two to three times higher than those of their white peers.

“It’s very likely that the trends they are seeing are similar in other states,” said Hedy Chang, the director of Attendance Works. Whether other states see those trends in their data, however, depends on how they decided to count attendance for students learning at home.

Connecticut, which implemented a new process for tracking absenteeism across in-person, hybrid and remote settings, required students to attend school for at least half a day to be marked present. If they were at home, they were responsible for participating in at least half of the virtual class time and the other offline work scheduled for that day. New Jersey adopted the same definition, but many states left the decision up to local districts or allowed a mix of criteria, sometimes nothing more than daily check-in call or a simple log-into a remote class. As of January, 19 states weren’t even requiring districts to take attendance, according to the report.

As officials debate whether they’ll allow some remote learning this fall, the Connecticut data shows chronic absenteeism among remote learners was at its worst in kindergarten and ninth grade — key transition points when in-person learning for students might be especially critical. The findings, Chang said, point to the need for leaders to track daily attendance, set consistent definitions for when a student is counted absent and build stronger connections with families so educators can intervene if a student misses too many days of school. With leaders beginning to craft plans for using federal relief funds, the report also highlights the ways Connecticut is spending last year’s federal money to target districts serving high-need students.

The state was among the first to ensure all students had devices and an , when U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona was still commissioner. But stories of families’ remote school experiences have shown that digital access doesn’t always translate into real learning.

“You’re at home. You have three kids all online and there’s one room,” Chang said. “That’s not a solution.”

‘Re-establishing relationships’

The Connecticut report adds to the findings of of attendance trends from FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University. Summarizing data from five unnamed districts serving roughly 450,000 students, the report concluded that severe absenteeism has worsened during the pandemic. In one district, 7 percent of students missed as much as half of the school year, compared to none who were absent that often before school closures.

The report draws on data from , a company that works with districts to improve attendance. The company noticed an increase in perfect attendance rates across the five districts, which points to the lower bar that some states and districts set for students.

Phyllis Jordan, editorial director at FutureEd and author of the report, said it’s clear that students missing half the school year need a lot of support. But if a student who just logs in briefly is counted present, that “makes it hard to figure out who’s in trouble,” she said.

To improve attendance among those most at risk of disconnecting from school, Connecticut spent almost $11 million from last year’s relief packages to create the — or LEAP — which includes home visits, summer learning programs, housing assistance and mental health support in 15 districts. State leaders also meet weekly with district representatives to discuss attendance issues among homeless students, English learners and other groups of students with higher than average absenteeism.

“We know the reasons for chronic absence are as many as there are kids,” said John Frassinelli, director of the department’s division of school health, nutrition, family services and adult education. “It’s really about establishing and re-establishing relationships with families.”

The East Haven Public Schools, south of Hartford, isn’t part of LEAP, but educators still routinely tracked attendance data to identify which students needed additional support. And when the district held standardized testing, Chris Brown, principal of Tuttle School, invited remote students to sit at desks outside the building to take the assessment. The practice spread to other schools.

“It was how we could draw parents in and get them on campus just to talk to them a little bit,” said Superintendent Erica Forti.

In a FutureEd webinar Tuesday, Charlene Russell-Tucker, Connecticut’s acting education commissioner , discussed the importance of working with health, child welfare and other state agencies when addressing attendance challenges.

“We all have responsibility for the same group of children, so why not collaborate and share resources?” she asked, adding that this approach has been especially helpful when families are hard to reach. “Somebody knows where they are, so it’s really important for us to connect.”

‘All over the map’

Connecticut began capturing attendance for students learning in-person, in a hybrid model and fully remote and then reported it monthly — instead of at the end of the school year, which is more common. The change allowed district officials to respond more quickly when they saw patterns of poor attendance or participation in remote learning.

Chang added that if states or districts have outdated software programs that don’t allow them to track and report attendance for both in-person and remote students, they should consider using relief funds for an upgrade.

Connecticut’s process allowed educators to notice which students struggled the most with attendance and identify trends they might not have seen otherwise.

While districts nationally saw sharp declines in kindergarten enrollment, for example, the Connecticut data shows that those who did enroll still missed a lot of school. The data suggests “kids are going to be all over the map of where they are with learning” this fall, Chang said.

In ninth grade, there was a spike in chronic absence rates to almost 30 percent for students learning remotely, which Chang said likely points to the challenges students faced starting high school without in-person interaction with teachers and peers.

“All the things we typically would have done to ensure a smooth transition to high school did not happen for these kids,” Chang said. “If you start missing a lot of ninth grade and getting D’s and F’s, you are not on track for graduation.”

Another trend at the high school level was more positive. In both fall and winter, there was little difference in chronic absence rates for students learning in person and in hybrid models.

To Chang, that suggests the flexibility of a hybrid schedule could benefit older students, especially those who need to work. “There are some things that we were forced to do by COVID that we might not want to give up,” she said.