Dear John,

It is week 222 in our new reality and we have some good news and some bad news.
 
We will start with the bad news. According to a new analysis from the Education Recovery Scorecard, four years after the school closures of 2020 most US students have still not recovered academically. 

The good news? The same analysis shows that there are investments in students that are getting results. 

These investments “helped students gain some academic ground and made the biggest difference for the nation’s poorest schools,” writes Matt Barnum in the Wall Street Journal. At the same time, not all of the money has been well-spent. “Eric Hanushek—an education researcher at the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning, Stanford University-based think tank—said the results of Covid spending have been underwhelming,” Barnum writes. “Some schools might have spent the money well, but others failed to give priority to academic recovery.”

The chart below on math achievement tells the story. All schools experienced declines in learning (light gray lines), but high-poverty schools had the biggest drops. There has been a partial recovery since then (light purple lines), with a key portion of this recovery driven by investments in programs like tutoring and summer learning (dark purple lines). 

Where do we go from here?

The first step is to be clear about our goal: we can’t accept anything less than full academic recovery. 

That means doubling down on the programs that are working and relentlessly advocating that money be effectively targeted in support of student needs. 

One reason for hope is the evidence of just how successful we can be in advocating for these programs when we bring educators, researchers, advocates and public officials together around proven initiatives that get results. 

We have seen this at 50CAN first hand through our Build initiative, which helps programs like Summer Boost catch kids up by dramatically expanding opportunities for summer learning. We have also seen incredible success in our advocacy campaigns, which since 2020 have secured more than 100 policy wins and hundreds of millions of dollars of new investments in programs like high-dosage tutoring. All this work is not only helping the Covid Generation recover what they have lost but is putting in place a new approach to learning that will ensure a better education system for the generations to come. 

There has never been a more important time to Believe in Better through educational entrepreneurship and educational advocacy and there has never been more at stake in ensuring we succeed in our push for educational transformation.

Last week, we looked at the important role of summer in getting kids back on track, including new data on the impact of the Summer Boost program. This week, we’ve got exciting new updates on AdvocacyLabs and work across the network to expand tutoring programs.
 

Best,


Marc Porter Magee, PhD
50CAN Founder and CEO

 @marcportermagee

“With federal ESSER dollars set to expire, now is the moment to make the case for using ongoing state, federal and local dollars to continue and expand tutoring,” FutureEd’s Liz Cohen stated as she introduced a panel last week that featured 50CAN’s Marc Porter Magee, JerseyCAN’s Paula White, TennesseeeCAN’s Chelsea Crawford and the National Student Support Accelerator’s Prof. Suzanna Loeb discussing the advocacy needed to make that a reality.

The webinar also featured the first look at The AdvocacyLabs Guide to the Science of Advocacy, a new book by Marc Porter Magee that 50CAN and FutureEd will be releasing this summer. It brings all of the AdvocacyLabs research of the past four years together into a comprehensive set of 31 lessons.

The panel considered the lessons presented in the new book in the context of their states, with particular time spent on a core messaging lesson: begin with betrayal.

“We had to drive home the betrayal that came halfway through the process to establish a tutoring corps,” Paula White reflected. “JerseyCAN was responsible for getting the first million dollars in the state budget for tutoring and then $10 million dollars after that. The Governor said they were going to get millions out to districts for tutoring, and then they botched it. They created a cumbersome process … they were three months behind on getting tutoring dollars out the door. Are you kidding me? We have millions of dollars sitting there and we’ve been betrayed by our government because of bureaucratic nonsense that’s holding up money kids need. Time is of the essence. And that message has really resonated on the ground.”

• The task this week is to watch the panel discussion and ask how the lessons presented can strengthen our collective efforts to make access to tutoring available to every student.