Call for Americans to Mentor and Tutor Students Ignores Magnitude of the Crisis

Jeanne Allen, Founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform issued this statement in response to President Biden’s State of the Union Address

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Jonathan Rick
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President Biden called for every American to engage in tutoring or mentoring our kids while missing a huge opportunity to validate parents’ demands for highly effective, personalized, full-time education.

Supplemental education has its place only if and when every opportunity for students to be substantively educated has been met.  With Covid era schooling creating massive learning deficiencies for a majority of students, we cannot cling to nostalgic notions of occasional support for students who need an exceptional and thorough education to succeed.

That is why our focus must be on allowing parents to access the best schooling for their kids, no matter who provides it. That is how we will ensure students achieve positive education outcomes and strong mental health.

This is the lesson we’ve learned not only from decades of research but from the Covid crisis. Schools and learning organizations that successfully provided personalized, individualized and exceptional education for kids were rarely part of the traditional education bureaucracy. Instead they were most often Catholic schools, charter schools, micro-schools, experienced virtual schools, after-school programs and even museums. 

Giving families the opportunity to place their children in the environment that works best for them is the future. President Biden’s own supporters at the Progressive Policy Institute are calling upon him to adopt this “modern” approach to solving the education crisis.

But should school officials and policymakers want to make tutoring a priority, they should embrace the work of groups like the Great Oaks Foundation which by placing college graduates as tutors in schools during the school day, not only sets them on a pathway to become effective teachers in the future but helps build positive and consistent community supports. That is one transformational pathway where supplemental resources would be well-spent.

For the nation’s most underserved students, the rest is little more than an insufficient band-aid.

Founded in 1993, the Center for Education Reform aims to expand educational opportunities that lead to improved economic outcomes for all Americans — particularly our youth — ensuring that conditions are ripe for innovation, freedom and flexibility throughout U.S. education.