A Surprising Endorsement for Tom Horne's Decision to Claw Back $70M Hoffman Gave to Ineffective Programs to (Finally) Address C19 Learning Loss

ASU's Center for Reinventing Public Education Fall 2023 Report excoriates public schools still failing to address learning loss - provides evidence-based support to Horne's plan for MORE TUTORING

Tom Horne just received an endorsement from an unlikely source: ASU’s Center for Reinventing Public Education. The CRPE’s Fall 2023 Report “The State of the American Student” is out. The results are sobering, worse than you think, and calls for massive investment in high-impact tutoring, exactly what Tom Horne has called for - to the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments of Arizona’s media and educational establishment.

This Stack, in 3-parts:

• Backstory | Tom Horne Tells Non-Profits: Show Me!

• The CRPE Report - The kids are not alright, the schools aren’t doing anything effective - and it’s probably worse than you think

• CPRE Calls for More Tutoring - exactly what Horne has called for

Backstory | Tom Horn Tells Non-Profits: Show Me!

Last week Arizona Capital Times reported that Tom Horne was clawing back $70M in Covid grant funding that Kathy Hoffman doled out to non-profit grantees - after giving them 5 days to demonstrate that award money actually led to measurably better student outcomes:

Grant awardees, who received the funds under former Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman, received a request for evidence that their programming had resulted in academic improvement on Aug. 18. They were given a five-day deadline. The programs that the department found failed to provide adequate “data” saw their funding either walked back or cut entirely. In a press conference today, Horne and Associate Superintendent Michelle Udall said the department terminated or reduced funding for 27 Covid grant awardees.  

(See the quotes around “data”?)

Horne and his department defended the move:

Kathy Hoffman took it personally and her reaction on social media was as swift as it was vacuous:

Read that again.

Appalling and disgusting - they got that money fair and square! She defends herself by defending the process she used to award the grant - but not the criteria she used to assess their effectiveness. Telling, no?

The CRPE Report - The kids are not alright, the schools aren’t doing anything effective - and it’s probably worse than you think

The CRPE Report is smart, comprehensive and worth a full reading. But I’ll just pull out some highlights.

Consider these:

The average 8th grader:

• 7.4 months behind in reading and

• 9.1 months behind in math

That’s just to catch up to pre-pandemic achievement levels - whether that baseline was already good enough is a separate question. And, as an average, some kids are even further behind than that.

Here’s another. The math performance for an average 13yo is at a thirty-three year low. Thirty-three. Year. Low.

Despite this, the Report notes that 90% of parents still don’t get it. If 50% of students are below grade level, and 90% of parents think they are at or above grade level, there’s a cognitive -“not at my school”- blinder effect here.

But yet the authors don’t blame parents - they blame public schools and the “policymakers” (what I take to be a politically-oriented, softened euphemism for the educational establishment):

[S]chools and districts are doing what they have always done, despite the fact that it is not enough…few are offering the interventions proven to be most effective in catching students up, instead choosing to spend precious federal funding on staff that will have to be laid off when the fiscal cliff appears.

In effect, they write, schools keep doing “what demonstrably doesn’t work.”

Boom!

The authors couldn’t sound the alarm louder:

Strategies for catching students up are falling short. Time is running out for students about to the leave the system.

So, what are the interventions they recommend?

CPRE Calls for More Tutoring - exactly what Horne has called for

For whatever reason, education professionals like Kathy Hoffman wanted to outsource millions of dollars to non-profits organizations for things like “safe space” programs, rather than actually, you know, do something so basic, so time-tested and proven effective, as: tutoring.

Tutoring is proving to be a massive - and obvious - missed opportunity.

Many schools said they would implement tutoring, but, the report notes, they never really devoted resources to following through to sign students up. At the same time, they note, the quality of teaching actually regressed during the pandemic…“heartbreakingly, leaving students behind.”

How much tutoring is needed and for how long? The numbers and prescriptions are depressing.

IF schools get aggressive about high-impact tutoring,

AND double the time on math,

AND hold summer school,

AND extend the school year…it will take:

0.5 years for every 1 year of learning loss measured

So, the next time someone says Tom Horne is “destroying” public education - tell them, they already did that to themselves.

End.