Overcoming Income Gaps with the Fierce Urgency of Math

BY BILL HOLAHAN

making the necessary investment themselves. If the investment is to be made, and latent talents developed for the benefit of the individual and society as a whole, it must be done at public expense.

Teaching math requires an educational background, experience and love of the subject. These attributes are transferrable to many employment options; teaching is only one of them. To attract more highly qualified individuals to the teaching profession, pay them more and invest in smaller classes.

Getting Help

Many students find it difficult to get accurate and timely help with homework. One way to reduce this mathhelp gap is to offer online tutoring through virtual meeting technology like Zoom or Google Meet. To reverse this gap, widened even further by the COVID pandemic, researchers at Johns Hopkins and Brown University propose a massive increase in tutoring online. They outline a tutoring service staffed by 300,000 college students and other community members who could interact with students struggling with their math and reading.

According to their report, “the most effective strategy for struggling students, especially in elementary schools, is one-to-one or one-to-small group tutoring. Structured tutoring programs can make a large difference in a short time, exactly what is needed to help students quickly catch up with grade level expectations.”

Matthew A. Kraft, and Grace Falken of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, set forth a 10-point blueprint for implementation. They propose that tutoring, greatly scaled up, could become a permanent feature of the U.S. public education system. “Tutoring is among the most effective education interventions ever to be subjected to rigorous evaluation.”

To engage such a large number of tutors, they suggest that peer tutoring be organized where successful students, properly trained, would provide the service for struggling students a few years younger. High school students would earn class credit for tutoring elementary school students; college students would earn workstudy pay, course credit or partial loan forgiveness for tutoring high school students. The Biden White House agrees. Biden is including such a massive tutoring plan as part of his administration’s support for student success.

Finally, the state of modern technology should compel state and local governments to provide all students with laptops and WIFI hotspots so that students and school systems can take advantage of this tutoring option.

Bill Holahan is Emeritus Professor and former Chair of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. An earlier version of this article was posted on Econ4Voters at grassrootsnorthshore.com.