Portland schools finally offer tutoring — to a fraction of students who need it

This fall, Alana Aaron, a fourth-grade teacher at Rigler Elementary in Northeast Portland, was faced with a mountain of a decision.

Her principal told her she could nominate up to five of her students to participate in Portland Public Schools’ first stab at providing regular, small group tutoring sessions to catch up those who were way behind after 18 months of fractured pandemic learning.

But Aaron felt many more students in her class would benefit from that kind of intensive help. During the regular school day, she has to stick to the fourth-grade-level curriculum and expectations, even though many of her students are missing key building blocks from earlier grades.

Researchers agree that regular tutoring sessions, either one-on-one or in very small groups, multiple times a week and built into the school day, is – in an ideal world – the best way to help the thousands of students who came back to school buildings far below grade level after the extended closures in 2020 and 2021.

But getting such programs off the ground and scaling them up to help all the students who would benefit has been an enormous and expensive challenge for school districts, both nationally and in Oregon, even with huge infusions of federal pandemic aid earmarked for academic recovery.

Some districts have turned to one-on-one virtual tutoring as a solution, including a pilot program in Tigard-Tualatin. Others, including Boston, Nevada’s Clark County and Columbus, Ohio, have experimented with tutors on demand, allowing students to log in to chat in real time for homework help, a method that has produced underwhelming results.

Portland Public Schools decided upon a different approach, which took 18 months to get off the ground and reaches only a small fraction of students. The district budgeted $1,086,051 to design its tutoring program, and get it up and running, which works out to roughly $3,620 per student served thus far. District officials say it is already showing promising and powerful results, even in just its first eight weeks.

One key difference: In Portland, licensed teachers are the ones doing the tutoring – as opposed to educational assistants, teacher trainees or volunteers. Teachers have more expertise in reading instruction, and families already trust their school’s teachers, said Darcy Soto, the district’s director of learning acceleration, eliminating the need to build relationships from scratch.

Portland also decided to narrow the focus of the rollout to just third, fourth and fifth grade students, who were in early elementary grades when buildings shut down and came back to school reading like the kindergartners or first and second graders they were in March 2020. Not being able to read means inevitable struggles in every other subject, Soto said, and kids who can’t read are often disruptive in class, hoping, perhaps, that in the resultant hubbub, no one will clock their embarrassment and struggles.

The design of Portland’s tutoring initiative is solid, said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University professor of education and founder of the National Student Support Accelerator, which is trying to expand access to tutoring.

“Portland is probably doing the right thing by starting small and getting it right,” Loeb said. “Using your own teachers can be effective and easier to implement since the teachers are well versed in what the students should be learning and they likely already know the students.”

Critically, though, structuring the program this way could limit the district’s ability to scale it up, Loeb added. That’s a particular concern given the millions of dollars in federal pandemic relief money that has to be spent or returned by September 2024.

“Other sources of in-person tutors, such as paraprofessionals, trained community members, tutoring providers and college students, can all be really good if they are well supported” and could help the district quickly reach more students, Loeb said.

The district has so far reported spending only $15 million of the $73 million it received from the federal government in the most recent round of pandemic relief funding, though some expenditures may not yet have been processed and posted by the Oregon Department of Education, which tracks that money. According to the agency, PPS has recorded spending just 15.8% of that $15 million on addressing “unfinished learning” through programs like frequent, small-group tutoring.

When the district put out the call for teachers to sign up as tutors, they weren’t sure how many would want to participate, even with extra pay as an inducement, said Soto. Educators already have full-to-overflowing plates, she said, and the district was asking for a commitment for 45-minute sessions, three times a week, for at least eight weeks, with hopes that tutors would re-up in the spring.

“When I say that I actually cried tears of joy, that is not hyperbole,” Soto said. “We got 133 teachers to sign up at 22 elementary schools.” Most will continue tutoring after spring break, she said.

Soto estimated that there are about 300 students enrolled in tutoring now, all of them at elementary schools where there are particularly high concentrations of students in special education, who speak English as a second language, whose families are low-income or who are Black, Indigenous or other people of color.

That means that roughly 2.8% of the district’s more than 10,000 third- through fifth-graders are participating.

Forty-four percent of the district’s third graders tested at less than proficient at reading and writing in spring 2022, according to the Oregon Department of Education.

Rigler, where Aaron teaches, is a Spanish-language immersion school in the Cully neighborhood, equidistant from the upscale stores along Northeast Fremont Street in the Beaumont-Wilshire neighborhood and the no-man’s land along Columbia Boulevard, which is lined with homeless encampments and RVs.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, her classroom settled into a sudden peace after the flurry of the 2:15 p.m. dismissal bell. It was just Aaron and two fourth grade students: Luis, 9, and LaMarcus, 11, who burrowed themselves into bean bag chairs at her feet and looked up, ready for her full attention.

Aaron, whom her students call “Maestra Alana,” launched into the kind of lesson that’s more commonly taught in kindergarten and first grade classrooms.

That meant a review of the sneaky effects of a silent e at the end of a word (“It makes the vowel say its name.”) Aaron also reviewed the sounds that specific blends of letters make —the oooh or uhh that oo can make, whether in cool or in book, for example, or the inexplicable silence of some consonants, like the gh in high.

From there, the lesson moved to a simple word read-aloud, then into two-syllable challenge words and finally into a group read-aloud.

“The day of the sale came at last,” read Luis, slowly at first, then with more confidence. “Fran sat at the gate and gave muffins and milk to people. Miss Hill left with six pants and a rake.”

Aaron stopped him, gently, and focused him on the word “pants.” They sounded it out together and discovered that Miss Hill’s purchase was six pans, not pants — a tiny but meaningful victory.

LaMarcus has those sweetly victorious moments too. Later on, during a “match the picture with the sentence” exercise, he was quietly proud of himself for a perfect score, observing under his breath: “Yes, I got it! I know the entire answer.”

He didn’t read a lot at home during online school, LaMarcus said later. But it’s getting better, now that he can make more sense of the words on the page. Since he has started tutoring, he’s “trying to read everything, everywhere,” raising his hand more to answer questions and volunteering to read aloud, Aaron said —something that she never would have imagined at the start of the school year.

New to Rigler this year after a six-year hiatus from teaching, Aaron said she hadn’t expected to be teaching phonics, phonemic awareness and other foundational literacy skills. The kids in her class who are on grade level are reading much more complex texts, like Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing” or Kate DiCamillo’s “Because of Winn-Dixie.”

“I knew they were going to be low,” Aaron said. “I still was shocked. My biggest challenge has been, how do I help all 16 kids in my class access the fourth-grade curriculum? It felt impossible at the beginning of the year. When a kid can’t read…” She trails off.

To get up to speed in how to teach phonics, she completed an online training course provided by the district, she said. During tutoring sessions, she’s using the “Phonics for Reading” curriculum by Anita Archer, which leaves little room for creativity. But she’s found that for Luis and LaMarcus, there is comfort in the routine of their lessons; the rhythm of what to expect builds their confidence.

Now, Aaron said, she’s trying to figure out how to get even more of the school’s students into the next round of tutoring, which begins after spring break, or even just access to the “Phonics for Reading” curriculum during the school day. She’s also acutely aware that there are other areas in which her students could benefit from tutoring.

“The kids are missing a ton of foundational skills that they need in order to do the fourth-grade math,” she said. “How do you find the time to teach them all the things that they missed or lost? We’re supposed to be adding and subtracting mixed numbers right now. And I have a student in the class who can barely add and subtract single digit whole numbers.”

Amie Rapaport, a research scientist at the University of Southern California who has been tracking the national rollout of high-frequency tutoring, said another area Portland needs to work on is scheduling. The best and most effective tutoring happens during the school day when students are a captive audience, she said, not before or after school, when family schedules can complicate attendance. (Case in point: Aaron couldn’t reach two of the five families whose children she had recommended for tutoring to get permission for them to participate after school.)

Soto concedes the point but says that at 21 of the 22 elementary schools where tutoring is up and running, participating students were already staying on campus for after-school care at the free Schools Uniting Neighborhoods SUN program. (At Chapman Elementary in Northwest Portland, which does not have a SUN program and where families rely on school buses to get their children home, teachers agreed to hold tutoring sessions in the common area of the affordable housing apartment complex where most tutoring students live.)

Next year, the district hopes to expand tutoring to middle schools, Soto said. And teachers at McDaniel High are piloting small group tutoring for ninth graders who are struggling with Algebra I.

By fall 2024, PPS plans a districtwide expansion of a new schedule for K-5 schools that will include 30 minutes daily for educators to take time out from the required grade-level curriculum to work with small groups of pupils who need extra support.

In the meantime, early data from the tutoring program is encouraging, Soto said. A student at Beach Elementary notched a year-and-a-half’s worth of growth in just eight weeks and is now at a mid-first-grade level, she said. Some students at Harrison Park K-8 School have moved up two full grade levels in reading.

Luis and LaMarcus have progressed enough to share favorite books with their classmates who are reading at grade level: Dav Pilkey’s abundantly silly “Dog Man” series for LaMarcus and the graphic novel saga “Amulet” for Luis.

“Spanish is still way much easier,” said Luis, who was born in Guatemala and moved to Portland with his father at age 4. But “now I read more … fluently,” he added, pausing before finding the just-right word.

-- Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com