By Matthew Kraft and Michael Goldstein
On May 12, former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam announced the Tennessee Tutoring Corps, a program that will pair college students with schoolchildren this summer to reduce COVID-19 learning loss. We applaud this effort to address the economic and educational crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. The need to support struggling students is acute. So is the need for job opportunities among college students and recent graduates. Moreover, Haslam is funding this initiative personally.
This is the first of what we anticipate will be a growing number of ambitious efforts to launch large-scale tutoring programs in the months ahead. Researchers, policymakers, and pundits alike have called for similar initiatives. What will it take for these programs to succeed?
Employing college students and recent graduates as tutors is likely to be successful as an economic stimulus policy. Many summer jobs and internships have been cancelled; businesses are tightening their belts and instituting hiring freezes. Tutoring programs create jobs, provide opportunities for young adults to give back, and expose tutors to a potential career in education.
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