Model and Strategy
“Pandemic-related school closures are deepening educational inequality in the United States by severely impairing the academic progress of children from low-income neighborhoods while having no significantly detrimental effects on students from the county’s richest communities, according to a new study co-authored by Yale economist Fabrizio Zilibotti.” ~ YaleNews
This is also true for San Francisco’s public school children. To address the learning loss our students face, the Ed Fund partnered with families and high-quality tutoring providers to launch the SF Tutoring Corps in April of 2021. The spring-summer pilot is focused on providing literacy intervention support to elementary-aged, economically-disadvantaged students of color via expert virtual tutoring 2-3 times a week. Within 48 hours of launching enrollment for families in San Francisco, 1,000+ families had signed up. Families have been wanting and needing professional academic support all year and now they finally have access to it, for free.Impact
Literacy can change a student’s world forever. Students who read proficiently by Grade 4 are 400% more likely to attend college. The opportunity to go to college is one we want for all students as the average lifetime earning gap between high school graduates and college graduates is $1M.
SF Ed Fund’s Tutoring Corps pilot is using BookNook, a curriculum that has shown six months of literacy gains in just six weeks. (See https://www.booknooklearning.com/tutoring). BookNook’s model is to create stable groups of four students at the same reading level, and match them for virtual tutoring sessions with a credentialed teacher. The small group structure provides a community of peers for students, a component that parents in our planning process favored.
For a per student cost of less than $500, the San Francisco Ed Fund can quickly extend BookNook’s proven approach to achieve grade-level literacy proficiency for 5,000 economically disadvantaged elementary students this coming school year. Meeting this goal will have a positive and powerful impact on closing the opportunity gap.
By offering every low income family free tutoring resources, we can seed the change for a school system with greater education equity. This is our opportunity to forever change the trajectory of kids in our city.
Currently, the Ed Fund and partner organizations have launched the Tutoring Corps for 1,250 Grade K-6 students to run through summer break. If the students are able to make gains approaching the promising results of prior BookNook implementations among similar populations, we will be able to close the gap between current performance and grade-level standards for these students and have a proven method to scale up this fall.
Leadership
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Stacey Wang
CEO
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Maritza Salinas
Director of Programs