State Strategies for Advancing Equitable Learning Recovery

Moderated by CGLR Senior Fellow Barbara O’Brien, last week’s timely GLR Learning Tuesdays session, co-sponsored by ExcelinEd, explored strategies for scaling a tutoring strategy statewide. To start the webinar, Casey Sullivan Taylor, Policy Director of Early Literacy at ExcelinEd, described her research into the approaches taken by two states and the District of Columbia. Next, Allison Rose Socol, Ph.D., Vice President for P–12 Policy, Research & Practice at The Education Trust, presented insights from her recent report examining a number of early adopter state tutoring programs. Both Taylor and Socol shared some of the key components of successful statewide tutoring investments.

Providing a state-level perspective, John-Paul Smith, Executive Director of the North Carolina Education Corps (NCEC), shared how that state’s tutoring program was formed by the State Board of Education and Department of Education and later transitioned to a 501(c)3. Smith shared the details of the NCEC model, including recruitment, training, investment and evaluation.

Executive Director John-Paul Smith noted that “Americans are better at responding to the wolf at the door, and we are responding to the termites in the basement. The pandemic has created this influx of federal dollars to respond to the wolf at the door and we want to be able to respond to both the wolf and the termites – because a lot of these issues were around pre-COVID.”