Low Hanging Fruit

Bret Harte elementary principal Hilinski (Mejia/Chronicle)

At the cost of $500 per student per year, a San Francisco elementary school has seen "jaw dropping" improvement in literacy skills: [bold added]

[San Francisco principal Jeremy Hilinski's] school-based assessments showed that 80% of the kindergarten and first-grade students participating in the tutoring were mastering foundational literacy skills by the end of the year, which was a “gigantic” improvement, he said.

Chapter One is a private tutoring company providing trained, paid tutors who are based in specific classrooms each day, working individually with students for five to 15 minutes at a time on letter recognition, letter sounds and other foundational reading skills. The students who were tutored saw their grade-level literacy rates jump to 54% from 24% in the limited period, according to initial progress reports.

“There’s no shortage of programs going into San Francisco schools for literacy,” he said. “This one actually worked.”

And it only costs $500 per student per academic year, with the donations-based San Francisco Education Fund covering the cost for just over 1,000 mostly K-2 students for the final five months of the past school year...

The Ed Fund not only paid for the tutors, but also covered the cost and staffing required to manage the program — work that included scheduling the tutors and coordinating with teachers as well as all the other bureaucratic and logistical issues that administrators and educators don’t have time for.

Individual instruction of "five or 10 minutes each day" was enough to show results; it may explain why parents who spend time reading to their kids can make such a difference. It may also explain why home schooling, for all its drawbacks, produces kids who are on average superior academically to those who graduate from public school.

According to a Census bureau 2024 report San Francisco spent $23,654 per student in FY2022. Where all the money went remains a mystery, but it's clear that "administrators and educators don’t have time for" a $500 proven program that helps children read.