Mr. SK

The New York Times Editorial Board decided to write about learning loss (gift link).

They rightly raise the alarm about an “epidemic of absenteeism.” Getting students to come to school is harder than ever, and I don’t know a school that isn’t struggling with lower attendance and interventions with diminishing returns. They offered unassailable policy recommendations:

states and localities need to create a more supportive school environment and provide the counseling services these students need to succeed.

Well, sure. But why not explicitly call for social workers and longer school days? New York City’s Department of Education promised a “revolution” and hired 500 new Social Workers, bringing the ratio of students:social workers from an unacceptable 600:1 to…a still-untenable 475:1.

What do you actually need to create supportive, trauma-informed environments with counseling services? You need time, consistency, and, well…counselors.

Less than a month before NYC schools closed in 2019, The Children’s Defense Fund published a report on Landscape of Guidance Counselors & Social Workers in NYC Schools. A few key findings:

1. 449 schools did not have a social worker.
2. To get to recommended ratios of students:counselors, NYC would need to hire between 2,500 and 3,500 additional social workers. Let’s call it 3000 for the sake of easy math.
3. Only 59 schools were at-or-below the recommended 150:1 student:social worker ratio.

I know it’s possible to run a school on public funds with less than 150:1 ratio because at Creo we have one counselor or social worker for every grade of 96 students which is…96:1. Our average salary for counselors is $83,000. Using Creo as a benchmark, it would cost ~$250 million to fully staff every NYC public school with an appropriate number of social workers.

I only run one school with a ~$10 million budget, but for a district that’s set to spend:

• $21 million on ads next year
• $300 million on its central office every year, and
• $300 million on superintendents and field offices out of a
• $37.6 billion budget…

this seems like some math worth doing. We spend ~4% of our budget on counseling salaries.

I’m suggesting the DOE increase its spend to 250 million / 37.6 billion or 0.7% of the annual budget.

The Editorial Board also suggests that schools invest in tutoring, but notes that tutoring, like teaching (and all things worth doing) depends entirely on implementation.

But high-impact tutoring is labor intensive and depends on high-quality instruction. It is most likely to succeed when sessions are held at least three times a week — during school hours — with well-trained, well-managed tutors working with four or fewer students at a time. Such an effort would require a massive recruitment effort, at a time when many schools are still struggling to find enough teachers.

Or, and just spit-balling, there are a group of people who are ostensibly trained in “high-quality instruction” and are at school, during school hours, at least three times a week…

“It is magical thinking to expect they will make this happen without a major increase in instructional time,” as the researchers Tom Kane and Sean Reardon recently argued.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. High-dose tutoring is great when done well, and it can net multiple positive impacts: increased instructional time, decreased teacher-student ratio, increased teacher time, and a potential talent pipeline for schools. I got my start in K-12 teaching as a tutor and…never left. Our home-grown Teaching Assistant program that we started out of our Pod Leader program during the pandemic has led to excellent teachers in hard-to-staff fields like Reading Intervention, Math, and Computer Science.

But whether you run a single school like me, or the largest district in the country (thankfully, not me) you can hope to find more people worthy of the work, or you can give people more time to do work worth doing.

There is money to hire the social workers and train the teachers and pay them to work a longer day.

We know it works:

The Editorial Board, again:

A collective sense of urgency by all Americans will be required to avert its most devastating effects on the nation’s children.

Urgency is a motivation, not a direction. Schools can’t and shouldn’t try to do everything. The pandemic magnified and deepened existing structural inequalities. Schools and districts should focus on the things they can control. Our kids lost people. That’s trauma. They didn’t “lose” learning but they received an inferior version in insufficient doses. That’s time.

There’s no cure for trauma and there’s no cure for educational injustice, but there is evidence that expert care can make a difference, if we’re willing to invest in it. Getting the experts close to kids and giving them time to do their work is the only policy I’ve seen that actually works.