This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education.
Two years ago, the National Partnership for Student Success and Accelerate, initiatives we co-lead or lead, launched in the wake of significant pandemic-era learning loss and additional impacts on student well-being. Both efforts seek to expand evidence-based practices in schools and communities: Accelerate focuses on high-dosage tutoring, while the partnership focuses on evidence-based strategies that enable students to succeed in school.
In both cases, we collaborate with programs across the country that help bring additional people into schools — beyond traditional staffers — to meet the scale and intensity of students’ post-pandemic needs.
Volunteers have been key to helping students recover from pandemic learning losses through tutoring, fighting chronic absenteeism.
AmeriCorps has been a critical asset to this work, providing committed and engaged citizens willing to serve their schools and communities in a time of enormous need. If Congress does not act, though, AmeriCorps’s participation could drop significantly — or even go away altogether. This would impact hundreds of thousands of students at a critical time.
AmeriCorps provides funding to nonprofit organizations and stipends to volunteers, allowing them to work full time in communities. Thousands of them assist schools with tutoring to help address learning recovery and develop relationships with students and their families to take on chronic absenteeism.
Americorps in action
In Philadelphia, for example, Joyful Readers recruits, trains and coaches a racially and generationally diverse cohort of AmeriCorps members who work full time delivering daily, 30-minute, in-person tutoring to pairs of students in grades K-3. Joyful Readers’ AmeriCorps tutors utilize a multi-sensory, structured language program that provides research-based materials and strategies that are essential to a comprehensive reading, spelling and handwriting program. They served approximately 1,120 students during the 2023-24 school year.
In Minnesota, Mississippi and New York, Math Corps delivers high-dosage math tutoring to K-3 students using AmeriCorps members, providing early intervention. Math Corps AmeriCorps tutors also track students’ progress and regularly meet with coaches to assess data and work toward learning targets. To date, Math Corps has served 55,451 students across urban, rural and suburban schools, with the goal of using evidence-based math curriculum to set students on a STEM career trajectory.
Minnesota Alliance With Youth implements the Minnesota Promise Fellows program, deploying AmeriCorps members as success coaches in schools and districts statewide to address chronic absenteeism. Promise Fellows serve on district attendance teams and assist school and district staff by collecting data; sharing information on health care, mental health, housing and other resources with students and families; and forging strong relationships with young people to support engagement, attendance and academic success.
Americorps: A bipartisan success
AmeriCorps has been around since the 1990s, with support from both Democratic and Republican administrations and congressional leadership, and in that time has grown to recruit around 70,000 members each year.
The House has now proposed gutting AmeriCorps.
The Senate should reject that proposal and fund AmeriCorps at a level that ensures that service will continue uninterrupted. In fact, schools and communities — especially those that have been historically underserved — need more AmeriCorps members to act as tutors, mentors and student success coaches to meet this moment.
Schools and communities are working hard to get kids back to where they should be. Progress has been made, but gaps remain. Absenteeism is a massive challenge facing schools, and they want help in addressing it. Effective strategies exist, but schools need additional adults – with robust training and ongoing guidance from leadership — to help schools, families and students address various obstacles to regular school attendance. When schools have a majority of students behind grade level in reading and math, as is true in many high-poverty areas, they need to employ high-dosage tutoring. These initiatives require people — and AmeriCorps each year identifies precisely the kind of people the nation’s students need.
This is a key moment to help schools and children across the country. There is broad bipartisan agreement about the urgency of addressing learning gaps and absenteeism, and there is enormous public support for initiatives like tutoring that reach the most vulnerable kids. Congress needs to ensure that AmeriCorps can deploy the tens of thousands of dedicated individuals willing to serve in schools and communities at this crucial moment.
AmeriCorps works in all 50 states — one of the rare programs that benefits both red and blue America.
The cost of restoring AmeriCorps program levels and helping hundreds of thousands of kids is modest. But the cost of inaction is high. Unaddressed learning loss and absenteeism will lead to fewer students graduating prepared for adult success, resulting in social and economic costs to communities and the nation. We urge Congress to support AmeriCorps, its members working in schools across the country and the students they serve.
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Robert Balfanz is director of the Everyone Graduates Center.
Kevin Huffman is a former Tennessee commissioner of education and the CEO of Accelerate, a national nonprofit launched to support the growth and success of tutoring and personalized learning in public schools.
This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.
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