Ector County ISD has gotten a lot of notice for its use of high-dose virtual tutoring linked with outcomes based contracts — the more effective and successful the companies are, the more money they can make.
An outgrowth of COVID aimed at fighting learning loss, the district is using Air Tutors and FEV Tutor as its main companies to help shore up math and reading skills. The program is paid for with federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding.
ECISD still uses live tutors, but there just aren’t enough of them.
When it was piloted the first year in 2021, 40 middle school students participated just to see how it worked, Superintendent Scott Muri said.
“Then we had 6,000 year two. Last year we had 4,750. This year, we will have less than 4,750 and the reason for that is because (with) high-dosage tutoring the goal is to bring kids up to grade level performance and then you no longer need the tutoring support. We should have less and less and less of that when it’s effective. Right now we’re identifying the kids and pulling them in so we don’t have a number yet for this year,” Muri said.
How long the tutoring lasts depends on the student.
“Some kids don’t need it, but it’s designed to be a full year tutoring opportunity for them. Obviously, we’re in the process of starting so it’s not from the first day of school to the last day of school. It’ll be September-October before some of the students get on board and then finish up around April,” Muri said.
The two primary companies ECISD uses are Air Tutors and FEV Tutor.
“They are different. Air Tutor is a live tutor in which you see their face. We’ve discovered our elementary kids really enjoy that face-to-face contact and having a live face to look at. FEV Tutor is chat-based, text based, so there is no face you just are communicating via text with the tutor. Our middle school and high school kids … prefer that. They don’t want to see the person or they don’t want to be seen — one or the other. … The elementary kids like the face and so we target each of those differently,” Muri said.
With Air Tutor, you must have the camera on so the tutor can tell if you’re getting the material.
“Your face … absolutely tells the story,” Muri said. “… They both use electronic whiteboards. … The device that the kids use … they can write directly on the screen. The tutor is watching the screen … They can see it on their own screen, so they know what a kid is getting and what they’re not. … But it’s more of the social-emotional, the elementary kids really like to see the person and the smile that the person provides … It helps with the relationship.”
Muri said the tutoring has gotten so much attention because of its success and effectiveness.
“We have identified some best practices that are in place for high-dosage virtual tutoring. It’s embedded during the school day. That’s a big one. We supervise with an adult and so there is an adult in the room … a teacher or a paraprofessional that supervises the environment. The kids maintain the same tutor, so they develop a relationship with that person. That’s important as well. The tutors and the classroom teachers communicate about the needs of the students, so the tutors know exactly what the kids need. The tutors have access to math and reading data of our students, so they are able to diagnose and then make sure that they’re supporting the kids and the various standards that they need support (in),” Muri said.
“The tutoring is aligned with our curriculum, and so it follows what our teachers are doing in the classroom. All of these best practices help make it effective. Then the last big piece that we use is outcomes-based contracting. The tutoring companies are paid based upon the academic growth of students. We tied money to effectiveness, so the more effective, the more money; the less effective, the less money,” he added.
When the companies are making money, the students are learning a lot, Muri said.
“We do that even with education. The Teacher Incentive Allotment is that when kids are learning at significantly accelerated rates, those teachers have an opportunity to earn significant money. It’s the same thing right here. When tutoring is highly effective, that’s great, because the kids are winning ultimately. But I think about for years in, not only in public education, but in many industries we buy something and we write a check for it. If it doesn’t work, oh, you know, oh well. We’ve already paid that money. And in this case, the money is tied to its function. If it works successfully, and at a high level, that’s when we pay them and they get a lot of money, again, but only if it works and works well,” Muri said.
He noted that there are a lot of virtual tutoring companies, but some were not willing to work with ECISD.
“They did not want the outcomes-based contract. If you don’t believe in your product, enough to do that kind of contract then we probably didn’t want to work with you either. We started with six vendors, and who all agreed to outcomes-based contracting. Four of them we signed on initially, because they were a fit for us. Two of them … weren’t as flexible as we needed them to be with our students. So we started working with four of them, but over the last couple of years, two of them really rose to the occasion because their effectiveness level was very high,” Muri said.
Additionally, the companies were willing to be flexible and agile.
“They provide a lot of support for our students and a lot of support for the staff members so right now we have two companies that have proven to be very effective, so we’ll stick with those two. But we’re always willing to look at others that are willing to to be effective,” he added.
Muri said the challenge in Odessa is that there aren’t enough live tutors. There are people in the community paid to be tutors and others who volunteer to help in math and reading.
“We don’t have enough human beings living here that are willing to provide tutoring support. When you think about two years ago, we had 6,000 students that needed tutoring. We just don’t have enough people in our community to provide that kind of high-quality tutoring for our students. We do have, again, elementary, middle, high school individuals that do come onto our campuses and provide tutoring services. We also have teachers that tutor students, as well, after hours. Those are available and we will continue to use those in perpetuity,” he added.
He added that just because you are good in math doesn’t mean you’re a good tutor.
“There are very specific skill sets that tutors need. All of the tutors that we use are trained tutors. They’re trained in how to tutor students at the elementary, middle and high school level,” Muri said.
The ESSER funds run out in 2024.
“We will finish this year with our ESSER funding. It’s probably one of the best investments that we’ve made with our ESSER dollars. We’ve learned a lot from it. We definitely will continue this, but we will have to find other other dollars within the general fund. This is one reason it’s so important for the State of Texas to fully fund public education is so that we can use our dollars to make these, you know, in this case, research-proven best practice investments in our kids. So we’ll be depending upon our state legislature to make sure the additional funding is made available for things like this,” Muri said.
As to when the Texas Legislature might get back and take action on public school funding, Muri said he has heard October and late winter-early spring.
Like other districts around the state, ECISD passed a deficit budget in anticipation of getting state funding.
“We’re very dependent, in not only Ector County, but 1,200 school districts are very dependent upon our legislature to make decisions that positively impact the work that we do with kids. We need them to come back in session and make some decisions because the money is sitting there. It just hasn’t been appropriated to education yet. We know they have the money. We don’t have the money yet,” Muri said.
