Why are 40% of U.S. elementary school students "below basic" readers, and how to make them better readers for less money

An excerpt from The Politics of Education K-12

by Lonnie Palmer

The first strategy to improve academic achievement in U.S. schools is to add many more hours of one-on-one tutoring from certified teachers delivered outside the regular school day for students who are struggling academically.

The only time a truly struggling student progresses is when they’re tutored one-on-one by a certified teacher who is following the curriculum and academic expectations the student is seeing in regular classrooms. I have tutored many students during my career. Their progress in a one-on-one setting can be amazing.

When I needed to, I tutored my own children, but most students don’t have a parent who can tutor them at home. Wealthy parents hire the best tutor money can buy when their children struggle in school. But our society has decided without considering the options that students who come from poverty or even working-class homes don’t deserve the “luxury” of one-on-one tutoring when they’re struggling in school.

Volunteer tutors are great but a certified teacher who follows the curriculum exactly, coordinates their work with the regular classroom teacher and makes certain the work the student does with the tutor allows them to improve their report card grades in the regular classroom is the best professionally appropriate option.

Traditional learning-disabled special education and remedial education teacher salaries and benefits should be shifted over time to more certified one-on-one tutors who work in the hours before school, after school, evenings, weekends, school vacations and summers. They should have a firm grasp of the curriculum.

The Politics of Education K-12 is available on Amazon.

An effective tutor diagnoses what the student knows, where the learning blockage – or gap – is occurring and how best to remove it. If they must back up and re-teach something, they can do that and then return to the lesson at hand.

That set of tasks (back up and re-teach one-on-one) is virtually impossible to complete effectively in a classroom with 25 students most of whom are ready to move forward with the instruction when some students lack the skills or background and are completely stuck.

A few gaps in learning caused by unavoidable school absences, chaos at home or in the neighborhood or normal learning difficulties can create insurmountable obstacles for students.

Planning and teaching lessons in regular classes at three levels, incorporating re-testing and re-teaching opportunities for all students and providing extra challenges for students who are ready for them can significantly decrease the numbers of students needing additional academic intervention, but it’s not enough.

A true special educator with a very high skill set and with a caseload of five to 10 tutors and 75 to 100 students could help tutors diagnose student learning difficulties and devise strategies for regular classroom teachers, tutors and students to improve learning for the students who are assigned to tutoring and continue to struggle.

But, in general, these tutors don’t need to be special education certified teachers. They need to be certified teachers with a good grasp of the curriculum. This program of tutoring for struggling students outside the regular school day would be provided to learning disabled special education students in place of their present special education experience and to students who are struggling academically but lack the special education label.

The tutoring experience I am describing should be flexible and should continue only as long as it’s needed. The tutoring should be focused heavily on the early grades with 60 to 70 percent of a school district’s tutoring support provided in grades K-4. The remaining 30 to 40 percent of tutoring resources should be provided sparingly in the upper grades.

I sat through far too many meetings with parents whose children were struggling in school and heard them ask for one-on-one tutoring outside the regular school day for their child that fit into their family’s busy schedule and was paid for by the school district.

These parents were making the right request, and I almost always had nothing I could give them. Volunteer tutors are great but a certified teacher who follows the curriculum exactly, coordinates their work with the regular classroom teacher and makes certain the work the student does with the tutor allows them to improve their report card grades in the regular classroom is the best professionally appropriate option.

The test data indicates that the numbers of students needing intensive tutoring (more than 50 percent in the early grades in some high poverty schools) far exceeds the number that can be served by volunteers or dedicated teachers staying after school to help “Johnny learn to read.” What I am suggesting will require major resources and significant professional time.

Here's how to effectively support all students for less money.

Why haven’t we looked at this option before? Because special education teachers and remedial teachers do not want to work odd hours in the early morning, late afternoon, evenings, weekends and summers. Principals don’t want to supervise their schools during these extra hours. Unions don’t want full-time union dues paying for jobs broken up into multiple part-time positions with odd hours that may or may not pay union dues.

Is this outside the school day tutoring option affordable? Consider a full-time special education teacher in 2023 with a case load of 20 learning disabled students in a low-cost state with an average $63,000 in salary and another $15,750 in benefits (social security, medical insurance and pension). Total cost: $78,750.

Certified tutors in these low-cost states average $25 per hour including social security costs. (I am assuming these will be part-time positions without medical or pension benefit costs.)

Currently, $78,750 of total teacher cost for the school district converts to 3,150 hours of tutor pay at $25 per hour. If all 20 learning disabled students received three hours per week of tutoring outside the regular school day for the 36 weeks of the school year calendar, it would require 2,160 hours of tutoring time.

This would leave 990 hours of tutoring time for summertime, school breaks and students who are not labeled learning disabled. This switch is financially possible, and it is much more flexible than the very inflexible special education system we now have in place.

In high-cost states, the average special education teacher salary and benefits costs would increase to an estimated total of $98,000, and the tutor rates would increase to $30 per hour with the total number of tutor hours available increasing to 3,267 so it’s still affordable in high-cost states.

Too frequently in high-cost states and particularly in underfunded schools serving mostly poverty students, the pinch of ever-increasing budget costs and local school tax rate concerns collide and school districts make the easiest political decision. They cut the programs and learning opportunities that are critical for students’ motivation to learn.[i] I am not advocating cutting art, music, or sports. I’m advocating we reallocate money now spent on special education and remedial education, which are not producing academic gains, to one-on-one tutoring outside the regular school day.

The tutoring I envision would also be administered flexibly from one to five hours per week with an assumed average of three hours per week per student. In the end, if five hours per week of one-on-one tutoring outside the regular classroom and solid regular classroom instruction can’t help a student succeed, it is doubtful any financially affordable strategy will work for that child that will lead to a regular high school diploma and passing all the tests required for graduation.

The sad truth is even our best efforts won’t be enough for 100 percent of students, but we need to devise a system that helps as many students as possible succeed academically with challenging standards and within budget.

Our high school diplomas will come to mean very little if we lower expectations so that every student “succeeds.” And we can’t continue to spend as much as we have on ineffective special education and remedial programs to little or no effect.

Our track record since 1970 shows that just throwing money at our educational problems will not work. However, the educational achievement data also shows that lower levels of K-12 education funding correlate to fewer college educated adults in the future.[ii] So we need to spend wisely.

The Politics of Education K-12 is available on Amazon.

[i] Valerie Strauss, “An eighth-grade boy’s ‘outrageous’ class schedule,” The Washington Post, September 12, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/12/an-eighth-grade-boys-outrageous-class-schedule/

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[ii] Thomas C. Frohlich, Michael B. Sauter, Evan Comen and Samuel Stebbins, "America’s Most and Least Educated States: A Survey of All 50," 24/7wallstreet.com, September 23, 2015, https://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/09/23/the-most-and-least-educated-states/

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