My name is Jenny Siegel and I serve as the Director of Programs at the Ed Fund. I have been with the Ed Fund over the past five years, and have greatly enjoyed being part of the amazing growth of all of our programs from Create Joy grants to our Maisin scholars to Mindfulness to our Circle the Schools corporate program.
Given the massive disruption of the pandemic on the learning journey of our students, I am particularly proud of what we have achieved with Ed Fund’s learning acceleration platform, specifically our high-impact tutoring program. Since 2021, we have served over 6,000 students to date, and we are seeing incredible results with measurable improvements in student learning. For example, in only 2.5 months, some of our first graders gained seven months of learning. Notably those students who started the furthest behind in their assessments made the most significant gains. High usage students, (students who participated in at least 20 tutoring sessions) starting the program the furthest behind gained approximately five months of reading skills during the ~18-week implementation period. The schools we currently serve are highly appreciative of our tutoring program because they are seeing the impact first-hand. A teacher at Bryant elementary stated that our high impact tutoring program “…provides students with the instruction they should have gotten in earlier grades. The teachers are great and address student needs.”
Recently, I had the honor of attending the National Student Support Accelerator Conference, organized by the Annenberg Institute. The conference was held at Stanford University and brought together hundreds of participants from all over the country, representing school districts that have utilized national COVID-relief funding to facilitate academic recovery through large-scale, high-impact tutoring programs similar to our own.
While each state, city, and district faced unique sets of implementation challenges, one common thread emerged: high-impact tutoring works. Extensive research repeatedly supports this conclusion. High-impact tutoring has the capacity to meet each child where they are in their academic journey, and provide them individual learning acceleration plans so they can more quickly re-join and absorb grade-level learning activities and curriculum. And just as importantly, high-impact tutoring also presents a cost-effective approach to address equity and broader access to quality learning for all students.
In our ongoing commitment to empowering San Francisco public school students, earlier this year, we launched Accelerate Learning SF, a groundbreaking $3 million initiative. Through this program, we aim to reach an additional 5,000 students in the upcoming school year. It is an ambitious goal but one that I know the dedicated Ed Fund team is prepared to tackle! We are excited by the results that we have seen thus far, and are firmly committed to facilitating access to this path forward for San Francisco public school students. Though we are busy with end-of-school year celebrations, we are already shifting our focus forward and looking ahead to the promising student successes in the upcoming school year!
