La Follette School director Carolyn Heinrich has been awarded a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to expand her evaluation of federally mandated tutoring programs in public schools.
The four-year grant will help Heinrich continue an evaluation of the tutoring programs the Milwaukee Public Schools offers as part of the district’s fulfillment of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
This 2001 federal law requires public schools that have not made adequate yearly progress in increasing student academic achievement for three years to offer children in low-income families the opportunity to receive extra academic assistance in the form of supplemental educational services or tutoring.
The next phase of this study will involve five urban school districts in four states: Minneapolis, Chicago, and Dallas and Austin in Texas (in addition to Milwaukee).
Heinrich and her colleagues, including co-investigators Robert Meyer and Patricia Burch, will examine how state and local educational agency activities influence the implementation of tutoring programs—including curriculum and instructional practices and policy and administration—and the impact they have on students’ academic outcomes (as measured by changes in test scores, course grades, and grade point averages).