The UCI School of Education Brown Bag series presents

“Promoting education equity through high-impact tutoring: actuating research in response to the pandemic”

Presented by Susanna Loeb

Professor, Brown University

Monday, November 29, 2021

12:00 – 1:00 p.m. (PST)

Register to connect via Zoom

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic shuttered schools across the nation, causing extended disruptions for over 50 million public school students and putting at risk their learning and future opportunities. Low-income, Black and Latinx students bore a disproportionate cost — the same students who experience poorer educational opportunities under ordinary circumstances. Research, experience, and simple logic shows that our best bet for addressing pandemic-related needs as well as long run inequities in educational access is to focus on the individual needs of each student — both academic needs and social-emotional needs. Well structured tutoring, what is commonly known as high-impact tutoring, delivers just this. When students build relationships with tutors in a high-impact tutoring program that complements classroom instruction, they show significant academic and social-emotional growth that benefits them as they move through school and beyond. While research has demonstrated these strong positive effects for multiple tutoring programs, delivering equal quality tutorings at scale presents a hurdle. This project broadly asks how we scale promising practices, hypothesizing the need for research-based tools, specific to each type of state, district and school level decision maker, and the need for proof points and investment in continuous learning and improvement. The project developed the National Student Support Accelerator with this purpose and the talk will discuss its development and initial learning.

Bio: Susanna Loeb is Director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, where she is also Professor of Education and of International and Public Affairs and the founder and acting executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator. Susanna’s research focuses broadly on education policy and its role in improving educational opportunities for students. Her work has addressed issues of educator career choices and professional development, of school finance and governance, and of early childhood systems. Before moving to Brown, Susanna was the Barnett Family Professor of Education at Stanford University. She was the founding director of the Center for Education Policy (CEPA) at Stanford and co-director of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE). Susanna led the research for both Getting Down to Facts projects for California schools. In 2020, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also an affiliate at NBER and JPAL and a member of the National Academy of Education.