Is tutoring the answer to pandemic learning loss? Oceanside Math Tutor – On Line or In Home

Almost four years after the coronavirus pandemic upended schooling across the US, millions of students are still struggling to regain the learning loss that set in from months of shuttered classrooms. In Massachusetts, achievement levels in math and English remain well-below pre-pandemic levels, according to the most recent MCAS scores. As the Globe reported in September, at the rate of improvement seen from 2022 to 2023, it would take eight more years for student achievement to return to pre-pandemic levels.

As schools across the country face the daunting challenge of making up ground lost due to the Covid disruptions, one of the most promising strategies is an approach launched in Boston 20 years ago – on the top floor of a former auto parts store.

In 2002, the Match Charter Public High School, which had opened two years earlier in temporary space, moved into a new home on Commonwealth Avenue. The three-story building it acquired had been home for decades to Ellis Inc., better known as Ellis the Rim Man, an auto parts and accessories dealer whose rooftop billboard was nearly as well-known as the Citgo sign that rises over Kenmore Square a mile to the east.

The school had quickly recognized that many of its students, predominantly Black and Hispanic teenagers from lower-income homes, were arriving significantly behind grade level. Match supplemented classes with tutoring sessions, but school founder Michael Goldstein said the volunteers and graduate students they recruited to “do an hour here and an hour there” didn’t seem to be making much difference. That’s when he and other Match leaders came up with an unusual proposal that they brought to the school’s board of trustees.

While Match transformed the first two floors of their new home into classrooms and offices, the top floor of the former auto parts building was empty. The school had planned to rent it out to generate revenue, but didn’t have a tenant lined up. “We went to the board and said, here’s a crazy idea: We could build that place out as a dorm and have a bunch of live-in tutors,” said Goldstein.

The board signed off on what became known as the Match Corps, a year-long fellowship for recent college graduates who would earn a modest stipend through the federal AmeriCorps program while serving as full-time tutors to the school’s 9th to 12th grade students. Most tutors lived on the top floor of the building, which was converted to a makeshift dormitory.

The school was quickly inundated with applications, with 460 people applying for 45 slots for the 2004-2005 school year. With just 186 students at that time, Match was able to have one tutor for every four pupils. A key element of the initiative was having tutoring baked into the regular school day, with students spending two periods each day in the small-group sessions with a recent college grad.

Unlike a traditional classroom of 20 or 25, where it’s easy for struggling students to get lost in the crowd, “there’s nowhere to hide” when they are one of only two or three students in a tutoring session, said Goldstein. “It’s class size reduction steroids.”

The results following the introduction of daily tutoring were impressive. In one year, proficiency rates on the 10th grade MCAS among Match students jumped from 56 percent to 92 percent in English and from 72 percent to 96 percent in math.