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  • Study of Oakland Unified’s parent tutors finds exciting possibilities and challenges

    Study of Oakland Unified’s parent tutors finds exciting possibilities and challenges


    Susy Aguilar, a literacy tutor recruited by the nonprofit Oakland REACH, meets with this small group of students for 30 minutes daily, providing science-based literacy instruction at Manzanita SEED Elementary in Oakland Unified.

    Credit: The Oakland REACH

    Initial findings from a study of a closely watched Oakland Unified program that recruits parents and neighbors as tutors show intriguing potential for other low-income school districts struggling to teach kids to read.

    By training recruits in phonics and structured literacy and assigning them to K-2 classrooms, the initiative offers Black and Latino parents and others a direct stake in seeing their neighborhood children achieve the skills to read. 

    “Oakland provides a key example of how tutors can complement and make more manageable broader efforts to dramatically improve literacy outcomes,” concluded a research report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education based at Arizona State University. 

    Through a partnership with The Oakland REACH, an innovative nonprofit serving low-income Black and Hispanic families, the district has been able to mine what the study calls a “pool of untapped talent” —parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, “many of them poorly served by public schools themselves and now brim with passion for addressing systemic problems in public education,” author Travis  Pillow wrote in an accompanying analysis. 

    “People within our own community as a whole make the best tutors because we connect directly with the children,” Susy Aguilar, a tutor at Manzanita Seed Elementary, which her daughter attends, said in a video about the program. “Just believing in the children and making them believe in themselves is one of the most important things for me.”

    Irene Segura, a literacy coach with Oakland Unified, said students look forward to meeting with their tutors, and the feelings are mutual.

    “When their students have those light-bulb moments of putting those decodable sounds together and putting that into words, it makes them happy and more determined to continue their work,” she said.

    The Oakland REACH was highlighted this week in a separate report that summarized effective tutoring practices. Accelerate, a nonprofit organization that seeks to expand high-impact tutoring programs into public schools nationwide, cited The Oakland REACH’s tutor recruitment efforts and its partnership with Oakland Unified. 

    The Oakland REACH is one of 31 grantees whose tutoring work Accelerate has funded. In 2022, The Oakland REACH received an unrestricted $3 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to continue its work. 

    The research by the Center for Reinventing Public Education also documented significant obstacles facing the program, concluding that paying the tutors a competitive wage to retain them in high-cost Oakland will be difficult. And gains in reading scores in the first year were uneven among schools and between kindergarten and first and second grades. Figuring out why is the next step.

    The district, through a literacy training nonprofit, FluentSeeds, trained the tutors in the district’s phonics-based curriculum and gave them a specific goal: work in small groups with every child struggling with the elemental skill of decoding for a half-hour each day, at least three times each week. In its smoothest form, teachers communicated daily with tutors, who worked regularly with coaches, when they weren’t pulled aside to substitute teach.  

    The analysis of 84 tutors employed by Oakland Unified found considerable variability in student improvement. The first-year study, in 2022-23, found positive outcomes in a district where only 33% of students overall, 23% of Hispanic students, and 18% of Black students scored at standard in English language arts on the 2023 state Smarter Balanced test. The initiative is still a work in progress.

    Gains made by students who were tutored in small groups were comparable to gains by students who were taught the same curriculum by classroom teachers, as measured by progress on the iReady reading assessment in the 2022-23 school year.

    Students who received tutoring from an early literacy tutor made statistically significant gains on the iReady test compared with students who did not receive any instruction from the tutoring curriculum. The difference was nearly a year’s worth of reading growth; students without the training made less than half of a year’s standard reading achievement.

    But the large gains in kindergarten between tutored and nontutored students were not matched in first and second grades on the iReady reading assessments. With 100% reading improvement, the expected rate of yearly gain, improvement ranged from 79% to 188% among low-income schools. 

    “Their average growth is lower than we would expect or hope for. But growth doesn’t just reflect the impact of tutors,” said Ashley Jochim, consulting principal of the Center for Reinventing Public Education and co-author of the study. “Tutors are only one part of the literacy instruction puzzle.”

    Factors in and outside the school affect results, she said, including students’ chronic absences, which were among the highest in California since the pandemic. The number of tutors within a school, how they were deployed, the size of tutoring groups and scheduling are among the variables. 

    Another factor is the uneven support of principals, Jochim said. Among tutors responding to a survey, only half reported daily communication with classroom teachers, and fewer said they were in regular communication with school staff leading the literacy work. 

    “There are gaps; this is where greater attention to quality and fidelity in tutoring is important,”  Jochim said. 

    Added Lakisha Young, founder and CEO of The Oakland REACH, “We’ve helped the district add a bunch of tutors. But if we don’t work on these other conditions to bring everything into alignment, then it’s going to make the work harder.”

    Jochim said that the center will spend the last year of a two-year grant collecting better and more data to determine how differences among schools affected outcomes. The range of reading skills widens in first and second grades, complicating the ability to compare the progress of tutored students and nontutored students, she said. 

    The secret of success

    Jochim said the most instructive lesson from the pilot is that having more adults in the classroom allows for differentiation of instruction.  

    “For so long in this country, we have assumed that a single teacher working alone in their classroom could sufficiently differentiate instruction for kids in literacy and math,” she said. That’s difficult, she explained,  in a kindergarten class where some students are reading for comprehension while others are struggling to decode one-syllable words.

    Jochim said there is “no question that this project is the right approach.”

    “My thinking has evolved,” she said. “Differentiation of instructions is the ticket to better outcomes — if we can figure out the specifics.”  

    Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University education researcher and authority on tutoring, is bullish as well.  The Oakland REACH’s partnership with the district and FluentSeeds matters, she said, because it treats tutoring as “part of a broader and coherent approach to improving literacy, not simply an ‘add-on’ program.” 

    “I’m excited,” she added, “what this systemic approach can offer for communities across the country.”

    Dilemma over adequate pay

    The level of pay may also determine if the tutoring initiative succeeds. The district pays tutors $16 to $18 per hour, plus benefits, which Young had to lobby the district for. Tutors who responded to the survey cited low pay as the biggest disincentive to the job, and it is likely a factor in why only five of the 11 tutors placed last spring returned to the job this fall.

    Young acknowledged that pay appears to be the biggest obstacle to sustainability. It is a difficult issue because, under the district labor contract, bumping up the pay significantly will run into the pay level for a para-educator, which requires more education than a high-school degree. Young is exploring other options to fill the income gap, such as a retention bonus.

    Roots in the pandemic

    The Oakland REACH incubated the concept of community-trained tutors in the Covid summer of 2020. Parents frustrated by the failures of remote learning had cited reading instruction as their top need, so Young hired the first group of tutors. Buoyed by their success, she began working closely with the district to make early-grade reading tutoring its priority as well once schools reopened.

    The Oakland REACH recruited the first group of 16 “literacy liberators,” handing out fliers on school grounds and going door-to-door in the fall of 2022 and partnered with FluentSeeds to train them in early 2023. Many had to be convinced they could do the job; the minimum requirement was a high-school degree. 

    According to the report, the first recruits included a young man who had seen family members struggle with reading comprehension and a retired teacher who “expressed alarm” that he had mistaught young readers and wanted to make amends through the science of reading — instruction grounded in structured literacy and evidence-based practices.

    Oakland Unified hired 11 of them to fill tutoring vacancies and placed them in the classrooms last spring.

    “Six months into the school year, Oakland had still not filled tutor positions in schools that served the most marginalized students. Oakland REACH was really critical to filling the gaps and ensuring the kids who most need this help are able to get it,” Jochim  said.

    A second cohort of 20 tutors began work in the fall of 2023.

    Extra training with leadership skills

    FluentSeeds gives all of Oakland’s K-2 literacy tutors a four-day course in SIPPS — Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words — the district’s early-stage intervention program. The subset of tutors that The Oakland REACH recruited for “literacy liberator fellowships” took an additional eight, two-hour sessions that provided background in the science of reading and focused on building student mindsets and tutors’ roles as leaders and advocates.

    “We bring in a social-emotional component of what it means to be a teacher in Oakland teaching students that are behind, and how does that make them feel?” said Emily Grunt, program director for FluentSeeds, who has led the Oakland training.

    One tutor characterized the fellowship as “life-changing.” The report described a session, offered by Decoding Dyslexia CA, in which fellows attempted to read a passage from Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild,” in which letters were changed to simulate the experience of a child with a learning disability. The passage became unreadable.

    “Maybe you’re just not trying,” the trainer told the fellows, projecting the hurtful response that many students with dyslexia are told.

    A model for other districts?

    Interest in the program is spreading. The Oakland REACH held a conference on the tutoring model that attracted representatives from 14 nonprofits nationwide. Another conference is planned for the spring. The Oakland REACH has created a readiness assessment to determine if groups have the leadership capacity, organizational strength, funding and strong ties with the community.

    “We only can work with people who have a certain level of readiness to be able to push this forward because it’s going to be really tricky,” she cautioned. “If you’re not used to working with your district at all, your head’s going to explode starting this out.”





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  • Joseph Komrosky’s recall leaves Temecula Valley Unified’s future uncertain

    Joseph Komrosky’s recall leaves Temecula Valley Unified’s future uncertain


    Temecula Valley Unified School District board member Joseph Komrosky.

    Credit: Temecula Valley Unified

    The Temecula Valley Unified School District’s future remains murky following a close recall election that ousted Joseph Komrosky, the district’s conservative school board president. 

    Four of the district’s five seats will be up for grabs — with two board members up for re-election in November and two seats previously held by conservative members needing to be filled. Komrosky told EdSource in an email that he will likely run for re-election. Still, his departure from the school board has kindled a renewed optimism for many that the district will be able to re-focus on student academic performance and well-being. 

    “I’m looking forward to getting back to working on issues of supporting student success and safety in classrooms,” said Edgar Diaz, the president of the Temecula Valley Educators Association, the district’s teachers union. 

    “That’s my excitement….Our board meetings can get back to that, versus having to listen to controversial issues being brought up and then passed without any sense of discussion or listening.” 

    Komrosky’s departure will leave the board with three members — of whom, only Jennifer Wiersma was part of the district’s previously held conservative majority; conservative school board member Danny Gonzalez resigned in December. 

    Wiersma also said in a statement to EdSource that she looks forward to “focusing on student achievement and academics for all populations, striving to improve school safety and continuing to encourage parents to be involved in their child’s education,” regardless of the outcome. 

    She maintains, however, that “it’s been an honor to serve this community with Dr. Komrosky.” 

    The recall race was tight — with about 51% of voters opting to remove Komrosky from office. Ultimately, he lost by only 212 votes. 

    “I am proud to have fulfilled all of my campaign promises as an elected official,” Komrosky said in a statement to EdSource. “My commitment to protecting the innocence of our children in Temecula schools remains unwavering.” 

    The lead up

    Temecula Valley Unified’s conservative majority took the helm in December 2022 — and proceeded to ban critical race theory that December. 

    Months later, in Spring 2023, they fired former Superintendent Jodi McClay without cause and temporarily banned the Social Studies Alive! curriculum stating the book’s supplemental materials mentioned LGBTQ+ activist Harvey Milk. 

    The board also passed a widespread policy in August that requires school officials to notify parents if their child shows signs of being transgender. 

    Despite widespread backlash — including from state officials such as California Attorney General Rob Bonta — Riverside County Judge Eric A. Keen ruled in February that the district can continue to implement its transgender notification policy while litigation is pending. 

    “Anyone who uses their position to attack LGBTQ+ youth is unfit to serve in public office, and we are pleased to see Dr. Komrosky’s political career come to an appropriate end,” said Tony Hoang, the executive director of  Equality California, in a media release. 

    One Temecula Valley Political Action Committee co-founder Jeff Pack said the organization — which filed roughly 5,200 signatures in December — had initially hoped to remove Wiersma from her seat — but ultimately gave up because the group did not have enough signatures to move forward. 

    The PAC also decided not to pursue a recall election against Gonzalez who resigned and moved to Texas. 

    “This is a democracy. This is where people vote, and they make the decisions. It’s not for me to tell the people of that trustee area how to vote or what to vote for,” said Temecula Valley Unified school board member Schwartz. 

    “They know what’s going on. They’ve seen how those three board members have behaved; and obviously, they were not happy with what was going on, and they changed their minds. So, I think democracy is alive and well in Temecula, and it’s a good thing.” 

    Looking ahead 

    With Komrosky recalled, Temecula Valley Unified’s school board now includes Wiersma, along with Allison Barclay and Steven Schwartz, both of whom are up for re-election this November. 

    Voters will also have to decide on a replacement for Gonzalez and Komrosky. 

    Meanwhile, Wiersma will take over as the board’s president because she previously served as the school board’s clerk. 

    “I’m proud Dr. Komrosky has courageously kept his campaign promises, despite the unrelenting boardroom lawfare and personal attacks on his family by the teacher’s union, community activists, and even our own Governor, Gavin Newsom,” Wiersma said in a statement to EdSource. 

    “People underestimate the steep learning curve and tremendous amount of pressure that comes with challenging the status quo as a school board president.” 

    Pack maintained that the recall is a “happy surprise,” but that he is shocked that so many voters opted to keep Komrosky — and emphasized that their work will continue, leading up to November. 

    “[Partisan politics is] going to be something we’re going to be dealing with for a little while longer,” Pack said. “We’re going to have to work extra hard to get some of those people to see the light and realize national-style politics don’t belong here.” 





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  • Too much test prep? Inside Compton Unified’s frequent assessments 

    Too much test prep? Inside Compton Unified’s frequent assessments 


    A tutor helps students at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton last week.

    Credit: AP Photo/Eric Thayer

    On paper, the Compton Unified School District has soared in its academic performance in the last decade. 

    District Superintendent Darin Brawley has, in part, attributed the upswing to regular assessments and the use of standardized test scores to help determine academic strategies at individual school sites. 

    But some teachers question whether the improved scores should be celebrated — and have claimed that the scores are higher because the district puts all of its emphasis on preparing students for tests, rather than educating them completely, a tactic they claim impedes rather than helps students. 

    “We’re testing in September, October, November, December, January, February, March — like we’re testing every month, so that the district has the numbers,” said Kristen Luevanos, the president of the Compton Education Association, the district’s teacher’s union. 

    “But as a classroom teacher, you know how to assess your kids as you go. We don’t need these huge standardized tests once a month. And so we’re wasting precious instructional time.”

    According to the Nation’s Recovery Scorecard, the district’s performance in math has risen in the past decade from 2.54 grades below the national average to only -0.86 behind — a difference of 1.68. And in reading, Compton increased scrores by 1.37 to 1.04 grades below the national average. 

    Brawley maintains that assessing students’ progress is critical to the district’s progress.

    “Our testing is aligned to state standards that determine whether or not kids have mastered the information. And for a teacher or anyone, an administrator, a politician, to say that you are prepping kids for a test, I think it’s laughable,” Brawley said in an interview with EdSource. 

    “Because those same people: What did they do for the SAT? What did they do for the GRE? What did they do for the LSAT? What did they do for their driver’s test?”

    The role of test prep

    In a given semester, teachers in Compton Unified are expected to administer dozens of exams. 

    Credit: Kristen Luevanos

    “You’re going to look at these lists and go, ‘When does education happen?’ And that’s the exact question that teachers are having,” Luevanos, who said she recognizes the importance of some test preparation.

    “[The district will] say, we’re using it to teach,” she said. “Anyone who’s ever been in education and has taken courses knows that’s not how it works. You don’t use the end goal to help. You start with scaffolding. You start where the kids are at. You start with the basics. You start with the vocabulary. You work your way up.”

    Going Deeper

    On top of indicating students’ progress, assessments can be a critical tool for teachers to reflect on their own quality of instruction, according to Julie Slayton, a professor of clinical education at the University of Southern California. 

    “If a student didn’t perform on an assessment, or depending on how a student performed on an assessment, or a class performed on an assessment, we can use that information to ask ourselves: What did I do that set the kids up for the outcome that they experienced?” Slayton said. “That would be good. That would be what we would want.” 

    She added that assessment should also be used by students to help gauge their own progress, which would improve student learning — and by extension, student outcomes. 

    Drilling students on what an exam will assess, on the other hand, “is not meaningful in terms of actually acquiring the knowledge and skills,” she said. 

    Slayton said “having a test prep orientation is more the norm than it is exception” — and that it comes as a result of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, where more schools have incorporated more test preparation to boost performance and minimize punishments for failing to do so. 

    “If we start with what do we want a kid to learn within five months or two weeks, or whatever the time period is, and how does that align with what the teacher is doing, we have a nice relationship,” she said. “And testing would just be an extension of a regular, appropriate assessment process that was embedded in a learning process.” 

    Despite the hard work of staff and students alike, Luevanos said the standardized test results aren’t revealing students’ academic struggles — from fourth graders who are struggling to read to eighth graders who haven’t yet mastered their multiplication tables. 

    But Brawley believes that preparations for standardized tests are supposed to help students better understand the language they might encounter on the exams — and that there are also equity concerns involved. 

    “Every kid whose parents has the means, they participate in that, they have tutors, they have specialized courses that they take that preps them for the assessments to get into college and everything else,” Brawley said. “So, why is it bad for Black kids, Latino kids, English language learners, to learn the academic vocabulary that’s necessary for them to do well?”

    Kendra Hatchett, a literacy specialist at McKinley Elementary School in Compton, agreed that getting students used to the language that appears on exams is critical. 

    “I have been in the classroom and have refused to do test prep years ago as a brand-new first year teacher because I thought, ‘Oh, it’s against my philosophy. We shouldn’t do test prep.’ But then, the kids didn’t pass a test, and it wasn’t because they didn’t have the information,’” Hatchett said. 

    “I may have taught them that five plus 10 equals 15,” she said. “That’s straightforward. We’ve got it. We’ve nailed it. But I didn’t teach them: 15 minus happy face equals five. So, that threw them off. I had to rethink my strategy, and that’s when I decided I’ve got to find a way to weave in test prep while still doing hands-on activities.” 

    Broader impacts 

    Luevanos said pressures to do well on exams have led some teachers to stop teaching novels and prioritize excerpts and short stories, which are more likely to appear on tests instead. Novels also aren’t listed on pacing guides reviewed by EdSource for eighth or eleventh grade. 

    The district said in an email to EdSource that it has not issued any directives to limit the teaching of novels. 

    Teaching students novels “takes you on a journey,” Luevanos emphasized, noting that certain standards — whether indirect characterization or motivation — cannot be taught just through excerpts. 

    “The kids are amazing,” she said. “They deserve to be able to read novels. They deserve to be able to play math games. They deserve to be able to just struggle with the work and create.” 

    Luevanos said that because students are spending more time on test prep and less on regular materials, they are not as interested in what they’re learning — and she has noticed more challenges with student discipline over time. 

    “They’re not learning how to think critically, how to be rational, how to be lifelong learners,” Luevanos said. “They’re learning how to read and answer questions.” 

    She also said she has heard about instances of alleged cheating. 

    Helida Corona, a district parent, said she had approached one of her children’s schools every year to express concerns about them being behind, beginning in second grade. 

    She was surprised, years later, when her child received an award for her performance in mathematics in the sixth grade. Corona said she “found it kind of odd,” especially as her child still struggles with regular addition.  

    The next year, Corona’s child got the award again, yet the child still struggled with everyday math, such as accurately adding up the value of money using simple single digits.

    Suspecting that her child might have been involved in some cheating, Corona said she learned more when she spoke with her child about the multiple-choice test. 

    “‘Our teacher sometimes helps us,’” Corona’s child told her, explaining that students would first guess — and if wrong, be instructed to try again, until they landed on the right answer. 

    “It’s terrible because it does not help you. They use those tests [to] place you in a class that’s appropriate for you,” Corona said. “If you continue this way, you’re going to end up going to high school, and they’re going to put you in a higher level math class, and you’re going to go in there blindsided.”

    The district, however, said they do not have knowledge of instances where students have received assistance on standardized tests. 

    Although Hatchett now believes in the importance of preparing students for tests, she also believes in having a balance — and says that the district could be more balanced in its approach as a whole.  

    “I know everybody’s struggle is different, and their perspective of what that should look like is different,” Hatchett said. “Each person should try their best to try to mix it up. You can’t just be all or nothing, all one direction or the other direction.” 





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