Education Week - January 13, 2021 - 3

Virus Surge or Not,
ELLs Must Return
To School for Testing
As if they didn't already have several strikes
against them, especially during this season of the
pandemic, millions of English-language-learners
are now being asked to return to schools to take federally required English-language-proficiency exams
amid the national surge in coronavirus cases.
That's because WIDA, which provides tests to 36
states, several U.S. territories, and the Bureau of Indian Education, has concerns about the validity of a
take-home test and students' access to technology
and the internet. The English Language Proficiency
Assessment for the 21st Century (ELPA21) consortium, which includes eight states, also will not offer
a remote option for its English-proficiency test.
" My job as a test director, is to say that the score
you get from our assessment means the same thing
that it meant last year, that gives you the same information so that you can make a choice and decision
about a student's proficiency, " said H. Gary Cook, the
senior director of assessment for WIDA. " I have a really hard time understanding how we can get a score
that's comparable to the score that's not remote. "
Advocates in at least two states, Colorado and
Florida, say it is unfair and potentially dangerous
to ask English-learners-most of whom are Latino,
Asian, and Black-to return to school buildings
while COVID-19 cases sweep through their communities.
The reliance on in-person testing is " far too risky
and potentially life threatening " and " raises serious
discrimination concerns, " Jorge Garcia, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Colorado Association for Bilingual Education, wrote this month
in a letter to Colorado education Commissioner
Katy Anthes.
Despite the requests, the Colorado and Florida
education departments have indicated they will
proceed with testing. If they didn't, they and
other states run the risk of losing federal funding
for failing to enforce federal standardized-testing
requirements.
In response to concerns about health and safety
protocols, WIDA developed guidelines on how to
administer its tests during the pandemic. While
having data to gauge how students have progressed
or regressed is valuable, Cook acknowledged that
requiring students to return to class does carry risks.

Willing But Not Able
14

14
59%

14

I have the training I need,
but not the resources
I have the resources I need,
but not the training
I have both the training
and resources I need
I have neither the training
nor the resources I need

SOURCE: EdWeek Research Center, 2020

Will the Coronavirus Hobble Yet Another Survey
Of National Education Data? Response Rate Is Low
What if a whole school year went by without yielding any
source of rich federal education data? That just might happen.
The disruption to schooling caused by COVID-19 may undermine one of federal and state policymakers' key windows into
what is happening in education on the ground.
The National Teacher and Principal Survey, run by the National Center for Education Statistics, is the last for NCES this
school year-and the latest to be hindered by instability across
schools since last spring.
" Response rates are lower across the board, " said Maura Spiegelman, the study director for the survey program.
The study is usually conducted in September. But this year,
many schools started far later because of the coronavirus and
shut down periodically throughout the fall. IES did not begin
contacting schools until October. It's also been harder to reach
principals of some 10,000 public and 3,000 private schools and
50,000 teachers for the sample.
NCES has pinned more data needs than usual on the survey,
last conducted in 2017-18. The center has already canceled or de-

Concept of a Nationwide Tutoring Program Gains
Traction, Especially in Light of Virus Learning Loss
A " pay it forward " system of tutoring-recent college
graduates who tutor high school students, college students
who tutor middle schoolers, and so on down to elementary
school-just might be the linchpin behind what researchers
envision as a federally funded effort to expand tutoring.
The cost? Perhaps about $5 billion to $15 billion annually,
concludes a new research paper that sketches out a blueprint
to make a 100-hour tutoring program embedded in the school
day a reality for thousands of students.
In the past six months, researchers have coalesced around
the idea of a national tutoring corps as a way to address what's

Many teachers this fall wanted to address
the Black Lives Matter movement with their
students and work to make their classrooms
anti-racist. But a survey shows a big gap
between the 84 percent of teachers who
are willing to teach an anti-racist curriculum
and those who have had the professional
development and resources they need to do so.

expected to be widespread regression in learning because of
the variable quality of remote instruction and sporadic attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research on one-toone or one-to-small-group tutoring consistently finds robust
effects in both reading and math, even when using paraprofessionals or trained college students.
A Johns Hopkins researcher recently proposed a Marshall
Plan for tutoring funded partly through federal Title I aid for
needy students. A recently announced project out of Brown
University is using a network of pilot sites to study tutoring
protocols to improve training and resources. Philanthropies

layed almost all its surveys, because they would cause too much
of a burden on educators or because NCES staff cannot safely go
to schools to conduct them. In November, the agency postponed
the National Assessment for Education Progress set for 2021.
If significantly fewer teachers and principals respond to the
survey, it may not be able to provide reliable state-level data for
understanding district needs and differences in how teachers
and principals are coping with instruction during the pandemic.
" It's really the Department of Education's primary source of
information about K-12 schools directly from the perspective
of staff in those schools, and we collect information that's not
available from other sources, " Spiegelman said.
NCES collects in-depth information on school structure,
teacher background, training, pay, professional development,
class size, and other issues. Data are often used to shape state
and federal education policies and budgets. This year, the survey
includes questions about how schools are adapting instruction
for remote learning, changes in school nurses as well as mentalhealth support staff, and other pandemic-specific topics.

have funded some local demonstration programs. Nations, including Great Britain and the Netherlands, have plowed some
state funding into tutoring programs.
Still, " We have very little understanding of even what it
would look like to scale tutoring, let alone what it would cost.
And without that information, it's really hard to have a constructive conversation or debate about whether ... it's even
possible, " said Matthew Kraft, one of the paper's authors.
Scaling, in particular, is a huge concern here. The K-12 landscape is full of efforts that had strong effects in small-scale
studies but lighter impacts after rapid growth. The reasons
for that falloff in effectiveness run the gamut, including less
fidelity to implementation.
The paper from Kraft and Grace T. Falken amounts to a sophisticated thought experiment to try to avoid some of those
pitfalls.

BRIEFLY STATED CONTRIBUTORS: Sean Cavanagh, Corey Mitchell, Stephen Sawchuk, Sarah D. Sparks, and Madeline Will. Edited by Karen Diegmueller.
EDUCATION WEEK | January 13, 2021 | www.edweek.org | 3
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Education Week - January 13, 2021

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