Personalized Learning Initiative
The Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI) is a moonshot to overcome pandemic learning loss and aims to bring high-dosage tutoring to students nationwide.
Challenge
The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic created not only a once-a-century public health crisis, but also a once-a-century education crisis. The closing of schools and shift to remote learning cost the average student at least half a school year’s worth of learning, and also widened existing disparities: Students of color and those from low-income families fell even further behind.
Opportunity
A large body of research (including research conducted by the Education Lab) suggests that high-dosage tutoring can help students more than double what they learn in a year. Now, the question is how to scale tutoring to support the millions of students who would benefit nationwide.
Our Plan
We are working shoulder to shoulder with sites across the country to help them quickly scale tutoring and other personalized academic supports, with the goal of learning how these interventions can best support students.
Project overview
The worldwide COVID pandemic created not only a once- a-century public health crisis, but also a once-a-century education crisis. This has set students back dramatically— particularly Black and Hispanic students and those from low-income families. This isn’t just bad for the students themselves, but—given the growing importance of education for economic success—for efforts to reduce inequality and promote economic growth. The country desperately needs some way to greatly accelerate learning to overcome pandemic learning loss.
The good news is that we’ve known how to accelerate learning since at least the 15th century, starting at Oxford University: tutoring. Tutoring solves the two biggest challenges teachers face with regular classroom instruction: individualizing instruction for students who vary widely in their academic level and needs; and (perhaps relatedly), classroom management. Data generated by our University of Chicago Education Lab research team, in collaboration with Chicago Public Schools and Saga Education, shows tutoring can double or triple how much students learn in a year. No wonder U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona encouraged all districts to prioritize their federal pandemic relief funds for high-dosage tutoring.
Unfortunately, districts around the country have struggled to act on Secretary Cardona’s recommendation. Cost is one barrier. Even with federal relief funds, districts can’t afford to help every child who needs support. And even when funding is available, labor shortages make it hard to recruit enough tutors.
We need a crash R&D program to develop and test new versions of tutoring that are, hopefully, more scalable. Without that an entire generation of students—tens of millions of children around the country—will live with the academic and economic scars of the pandemic. The R&D problem to be solved is not pedagogical so much as one of economics: How do we scale the benefits of tutoring to every child who would benefit? How do we deliver Oxford- quality tutoring at massive scale at public school prices?
The plan
In partnership with MDRC and Saga Education, the Education Lab is leading this initiative to help school districts, and departments of education in states all around the country develop and test new versions of tutoring that are more scalable. Our goal is to overcome pandemic-induced learning loss and undo the wide disparities that predated (and were exacerbated by) the pandemic. We are focusing on important educational outcomes such as third grade literacy (the data show that students who can’t read at grade level by third grade are four times as likely to drop out) and middle school/high school math (ninth graders who haven’t passed algebra I are five times more likely to drop out).
Over the next several years, through our Personalized Learning Initiative, we seek to:
• Serve 30,000 high-need students with different innovative (and hopefully more scalable) forms of tutoring in collaboration with sites across the country, including Chicago, New Mexico, and Fulton County, Georgia
• Continual improvement by measuring impacts on student learning and sharing results back to sites to make real- time adjustments in program design and implementation
• Scale the most promising of these new tutoring models nationwide in collaboration with America Achieves, one of the nation’s leading incubators of educational innovations, and Accelerate, a national initiative to embed high-impact tutoring in public schools
Years Active
2021 – present
Topics
Project Team
Monica Bhatt
Senior Research Director
Jon Guryan
Faculty Co-Director
Sadie Stockdale Jefferson
Executive Director
Jens Ludwig
Faculty Co-Director
Personalized Learning Initiative Research Brief
Overview of the Personalized Learning Initiative, a nationwide R&D initiative to scale the benefits of tutoring.
Research Brief: Personalized Learning Initiative
Learn more about the Personalized Learning Initiative.
Saga Technology Research Brief
Learn more about the Saga Technology study and its early results.
Not Too Late: Improving Academic Outcomes among Adolescents
Read our academic paper on the early Saga studies published in the American Economic Review.
This work is supported by an $18 million donation from America Achieves, Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin, and Arnold Ventures.
Questions? Contact the Education Lab Executive Director Sadie Stockdale Jefferson, PhD at ssjefferson@uchicago.edu for more information.
High-dosage tutoring is providing our children the support they need to recover from the learning challenges of the pandemic and reach their full academic potential. We’re proud to be an anchor partner in this project so that we can reach students across Chicago and learn how we can best tailor our supports.
Pedro Martinez, CEO of Chicago Public Schools
The Education Lab is one of our nation’s premier educational research organizations, and we are thrilled to have them spearheading this project. Their commitment to rigorous research and proven track record of partnership makes them an excellent choice to support school districts and policymakers seeking strategies that advance student outcomes.
Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate
We need to accelerate learning for the millions of students who have fallen behind during the pandemic. I care deeply about addressing this urgent recovery challenge and helping America’s students realize their true potential. I am thankful so many people are committed to this undertaking, which is important for the future of our country.
Ken Griffin, Founder and CEO, Citadel