LA Unified Looks Into Tutoring As Parents’ Confidence in Education Quality Drops

A YMCA staff member assists a child as they attend online classes at a learning hub inside the Crenshaw Family YMCA during the Covid-19 pandemic in Los Angeles on February 17, 2021. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

LOS ANGELES—As Angelenos are losing confidence in the quality of education in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which is troubled by declining academic performance and enrollment, district officials are looking into tutoring as a potential solution for learning loss during the pandemic.

The recent poll conducted by Great Public Schools Now, a nonprofit organization focusing on LA’s public education, reported that 70 percent of participants rated LAUSD schools’ quality of education negatively, and 73 percent of voters voted “no” when the poll asked if they believed every LA neighborhood has a good K–12 school.

This lack of faith in Los Angeles’s education system is backed up by declining academic performance numbers in the district.

According to an LAUSD spokesperson, only 48 percent of kindergarten students met the state’s early literacy benchmarks in the 2020–21 school year—a three percent drop from the previous year, and a 19 percent drop from the 2018–19 school year.

Meanwhile, only 81 percent of four-year cohort seniors in the district’s high schools made it to graduation last school year though that number is up about 1 percent from the previous year and two percent from the 2018­–19 school year—when the national average graduation rate for public high schools was 86 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

This comes as the state’s largest school district is seeing a decline in enrollment numbers, with LAUSD officials projecting earlier this month that enrollment will drop by about 4 percent each year over the next decade—reaching below 400,000 in two years.

Students and parents arrive masked for the first day of the school year at Grant Elementary School in Los Angeles, on Aug. 16, 2021. Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

Dr. Stefan Bean, a 24-year educator who formerly served as superintendent of Aspire Public Schools in LA, was “not really that surprised” about the decline in LAUSD’s enrollment, he said in an interview with the EpochTV’s California Insider program.

Though Bean pointed out that the enrollment decline has been ongoing since pre-pandemic and can be partially attributed to population decrease—as Los Angeles has 185,000 fewer people from 2020 to 2021, according to census data—he said he hopes the decline will serve as a wake-up call for public schools to evaluate how they should improve.

“When traditional public schools start to see why they’re losing students it makes them actually reflect on what they need to do to improve their school system,” Bean said.

Bean said he thought recent changes in the state’s political climate made district leaders focus on “substituting [education] with politics like mask mandates and vaccine mandates ... versus what really matters, and that’s educating our students.”

“Teachers work really hard, but teachers need to be led properly, need to be led the right way,” Bean said. “Teachers are being pulled all over the place rather than doing what they first intended to get into education for—educating the minds of our young kids.”

LAUSD’s new superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, said he wants to prioritize improving academic performance after the district lifted the indoor mask mandate for students earlier this month—as a result of a renegotiated contract with its local teachers’ union.

“Now that this [mask mandate] issue is behind us, it is time to focus on each student’s full academic potential,” he said on March 18.

Alberto Carvalho, then Miami-Dade Schools superintendent, is seen during a school board meeting in Miami, Fla., on March 1, 2018. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The LAUSD Board of Education is currently researching learning services that would aid academic performance, especially tutoring.

A March 29 report by the LAUSD Board of Education found that 11 percent of elementary school students are receiving tutoring, while about 5 percent of middle school and high school students are working with a tutor. The report did not specify how long each tutoring session was, and whether tutoring took place online or in person.

Carvalho said during the March 29 board meeting he intended to have the district conduct more thorough research into tutoring statistics.

Board member Jackie Goldberg said at the meeting she was “stunned to see so few students” in tutoring because extra tutoring has been one of the major ways to make up “lost learning” nationwide.

Goldberg went on to say she was “anxious to know how we increase [students in tutoring] dramatically and whether or not we have ... enough resources to increase it dramatically.”

There are currently five tutoring programs in the district, according to the report, three for elementary school students, and two for upper grades.

Spokespeople for the district and its Board of Education did not respond to a request for comment by press deadline.