After early success in recruiting 323,000 K-12 tutors and coaches to help undo pandemic learning loss, the innovative nationwide program looks to the future.
Last October, the Partnership for Student Success, a nationwide initiative to counteract pandemic-era learning loss, announced it had surpassed its aggressive recruitment goal, mobilizing more than 323,000 tutors, mentors, and student success coaches nationwide. And they did it nine months ahead of schedule. The initiative now enters a critical new phase aimed at scaling and sustaining the network in K-12 schools across the country.
“What we noticed is that moving from research to results takes people—people in classrooms, in after-school programs, in communities. The teachers were overwhelmed,” said Bob Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, which manages the initiative. “Schools needed more hands, and this initiative provided the people power in a coordinated, evidence-backed way.”
A sense of urgency
With its legions assembled, phase two will play out over the next two years as the Partnership for Student Success focuses on expanding the reach of high-impact tutoring, mentoring, success coaching, and other supports through strengthened local partnerships among school districts, higher education institutions, and nonprofits.
New efforts include free online training of postsecondary transition coaches and mentors, a federal work-study toolkit to encourage colleges to place more students in these school support roles, and a newly formed consortium to create additional free training materials.
“There is a sense of urgency here,” Balfanz says. “Every year that kids aren’t getting to school, focusing in class, or completing their work is another year they fall behind. There are long-term impacts to learning loss—for them, their families, their communities, and the nation. We have to move fast into this next phase.”
More people, more results
The value of evidence-based solutions like high-impact tutoring have been well known to education agencies, institutions, and nonprofits as effective means of addressing learning loss—but there have always been too few people to deliver them.
In response to that shortfall, the U.S. Department of Education, AmeriCorps, and Johns Hopkins formed the Partnership for Student Success in 2022 hoping to inspire 250,000 college students, community members, and others to join its scalable and sustainable model for student support. The latest recruitment numbers are a strong indicator of the demand for these services and the eagerness of communities to step up to the challenge.
The partnership will reach into as many school districts as possible. To meet the challenges of reaching students in rural areas, for instance, it has formed a new working group to explore ways to bring people-powered solutions to these specific communities. To measure progress, the partnership will annually survey school principals through RAND Corp.’s American School Leader Panel.
“We’ve built the coalition—more than 225 nonprofits, 75 colleges, and 200 school districts,” Balfanz said. “Now, the goal is for more schools to say, ‘We’re good. All our kids are getting the help they need.’ That’s how we’ll measure the success of the Partnership for Student Success.”
