After-school sites include Jordan Road School; Bassett cites benefits for young ‘scholars’ and college student tutors
SOMERS POINT — Katherine Bassett was chosen to lead a statewide summer tutoring program in 2021 to get young children back up to speed on math after their education was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bassett ran the program so efficiently that she convinced backers to put the leftover funding into an after-school tutoring program running this winter and spring in a dozen sites across New Jersey, including Jordan Road School in Somers Point.
Now she is trying to make summer tutoring and in-school tutoring a regular part of education in the state because of the impact it can have on children’s academic performance and social-emotional skills.
Bassett, who was named New Jersey Teacher of the Year in 2000 when she was a library media specialist at Ocean City Intermediate School, went on to different leadership roles in education organizations and founded and runs her own educational consultancy firm, Tall Poppy.
Last year she was tapped to be executive director of the NJ Tutoring Corps, a summer pilot program funded with $2.4 million by the New Jersey Pandemic Relief Fund, with the support of New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy, wife of Gov. Phil Murphy, and the Overdeck Family Foundation.
The NJ Tutoring Corps was launched by The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) School of Education and aimed at children in kindergarten through fifth grade to improve their math skills and their attitudes about learning math. The seven-week program featured tutors working with groups of three to five students — known as scholars — three times a week. TCNJ partnered with New Jersey Boys and Girls Clubs and YMCA Alliance and had 2,000 scholars at 23 sites in 13 counties across the state at their facilities.
There were 90 tutors, most of them college students studying to become teachers; Bassett refers to them as “pre-service educators.” She participated in the training of the tutors and oversaw 12 site coordinators who had teaching certification and/or more teaching experience.
Bassett, who had just more than a month to get the program up and running after being hired in late May, said the participants were called scholars — not students or children – because “it sends a strong message to young people that they’re here to learn, they’re here for a purpose, to better their lives.”
The program was successful, according to an evaluation by the Center for Research and Evaluation on Education and Human Services at Montclair State University. Bassett points to a number of key findings in the report, notably showing an increase in scholars’ math skills ranging from 13 to 69 points depending on the units and grades.
A factor she saw as more important is the attitudes the scholars had after the program, with 98 percent having a better understanding of math, 94 percent saying they would be better at asking for help and helping friends, and that 92 percent would participate more in class.
“That is what I’m the most proud of. … Scholars are so often afraid of asking for help, but in our program asking for help is so easy,” she said. Noting the other statistics, she added, “That’s amazing data and I’m incredibly proud of that.”
Bassett also was pleased by a comment from a director in Passaic who asked the scholars about their favorite part of the summer program. The scholars had lots of activities at the sites — swimming, coding, basketball, video gaming, arts and crafts, physical activity. “The answer she got was tutoring. The scholars’ favorite part of the summer program was tutoring,” Bassett related. “They were hungry for that face-to-face time with a teacher. And they got it. That’s another phenomenal outcome. The scholars were saying they enjoyed it, that it was valuable and it was their favorite part. Part of that is because we made it so much fun.”
On the other side of the equation, Bassett also was proud that the tutors who participated “feel better prepared to be teachers.”
Summer success leads to after-school program with a caveat: burnout
Bassett said they were able to run the program so efficiently over the summer that they spent only $800,000 of the $2.4 million from the Pandemic Relief Fund and Overdeck Family Foundation. She approached the leaders with the idea of using the remaining money to run an after-school pilot tutoring program and was given a green light in November.
She was able to begin the after-school program last week in a dozen sites, including at Jordan Road School, but Bassett was disappointed that she had to scale back her plans.
She wanted to double the size of the summer program and get to 42 sites with an after-school program running from Jan. 24 to May 20, but ran into something unexpected that posed a roadblock to expansion — teacher burnout.
With a lifelong career in education, Bassett has accumulated a vast national network of educators and she has heard that teachers are burned out this year because of changing attitudes and the changes wrought by the pandemic.
“I’ve never seen it like this before. Everyone thought that last year would be the burnout year, but last year teachers were actually appreciated, they were valued,” she said.
This year, that all has changed, Bassett said.
“Educators are now being seen as a roadblock to parents being able to get back to work, businesses able to reopen. It’s just been a very negative tone toward educators, and educators I never thought I would see leave the profession are seriously considering or actually leaving the profession. It is incredibly sad,” she said.
As she was developing the after-school program, the NJ Tutoring Corps could not recruit enough educators and had the same issue with college students. Sophomores are just getting onto campus for the first time after a year of remote instruction and it has been a year and a half away from campus for students going into their junior years.
“It’s been overwhelming for educators and pre-service educators,” Bassett said.
They scaled back to 12 sites and are reaching 500 scholars. She is particularly excited about Jordan Road School participating because that is where her children attended school while she worked at Ocean City Intermediate School. There also are sites in Vineland, Newark, Glassboro, Hunterdon County, Trenton, Lawrenceville, Middlesex County, Morris County, Monmouth County and Passaic County. Eight sites are in person, others are virtual with tutors and students working on devices.
They are still doing the math tutoring using Illustrative Math, a highly rated program recommended by TCNJ’s School of Education, and they have added literacy using the i-Ready program, which Bassett said is “phenomenal.”
The literacy focus is on kindergarten through second grade and math is still tutored in kindergarten through fifth grade. Tutors include college students, retired teachers, some certified teachers, paraprofessionals and substitute teachers, all of whom had undergone extensive background checks, which added to the time required to recruit.
Bassett said recruiting college students not only is important but is one of the reasons she accepted the position as executive director of the NJ Tutoring Corps.
“I knew it was going to be gargantuan but I wanted to be able to help better prepare teachers,” she said.
That also is why the after-school program is limited to its current timeframe; it has to match up with the spring college semesters.
Aiming for a year-round program and change in focus
Now that the after-school program is up and running, Bassett has turned her attention to making the NJ Tutoring Corps a year-round concern, continuing its work with the organizations in the summer but changing its focus during the school year.
The change is moving tutoring from after school to embedding it in the school day.
“The after-school tutoring model is not something that seems feasible to me and to my associate director right now because of the difficulty in recruiting educators to do an after-school program,” she said.
Having them work all day and then adding two more hours after school is just too much.
“What I would like to see is to embed the high-dosage tutoring — one to one or one to four scholars at a time — in the school day. Just as they pull out scholars for programs such as basic skills, Gifted and Talented, what have you, we would like to see tutoring embedded in the school day, and then in the summer,” she said.
That is going to take funding.
As someone who learned from having run a nonprofit, she firmly believes an organization cannot rely on philanthropic funding because it is not sustainable. She wants to target federal ESSER funding that has been awarded to schools, which has predecessors in programs such as No Child Left behind. ESSER stands for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund.
“Some of the ESSER funding has been specifically targeted to tutoring, so there is a recognition that scholars have gaps in their learning,” Bassett asserted.
She uses the term “gaps” because she doesn’t like the more widely used term “learning loss.”
“Loss infers they didn’t learn anything and that’s not true. We all learned a lot,” she said. “I see how much scholars and all of us have grown through the pandemic in terms of our social-emotional skills and our metacognitive skills.” (Metacognitive skills involve individuals evaluating and understanding their own ways they learn and solve problems.)
Those other skills — some referenced in the evaluation of the NJ Tutoring Corps summer program — include resilience, courage, flexibility and adaptability, curiosity — “are all areas where both our scholars and educators have grown tremendously, but at the same time some of our scholars do have gaps in their academic learning.
“We need to value those things and provide tutoring where there may be gaps,” she said. “We’re focusing on building up skills in all areas — academics first and foremost — and also providing tutoring in social justice and social-emotional learning.”
The other skills are important, she said, because they prepare young people for future careers and are valued by corporate America, which is looking for good listeners, collaborative team workers and adept thinkers.
“These are things we need to prepare our scholars to do,” she said.
One key aspect of the pilot tutoring programs in the summer and after school is that they have learned from the experience — finding success and “learning hard lessons. I’m a big fan of failing forward,” she said. They analyzed what worked and what didn’t and understand what is needed to make it better.
“Now that we’re up and going we can turn our focus to fundraising. — through philanthropy and directly with school districts and their ESSER funding,” she said. “(Schools) have been given this tremendous gift — the likes of which I’ve never seen before — and we would like to help them spend it.”
“We would like to see schools devote some fraction of their ESSER funding to our tutoring program,” she said, and more educators taking a role as well.
“We would like educators to help strengthen our training program. I’m really proud of our training program, but make it even better,” she said. “The greatest insights we get are from educators and pre-service educators.
“We would like to see more colleges and universities get the word out to recruit their pre-service educators. We’ve had tremendous support from some but we would like to get it from even more because they’re the lifeblood of the program,” Bassett added.
She said those pre-service educators in turn take what they learned from tutoring back to their colleges and universities. Bassett also wants to continue and expand tutoring at the Boys and Girls Clubs and YMCA Alliance.
Bassett was impressed with how the NJ Tutoring Corps came about, citing Tammy Murphy, the Pandemic Relief Fund and the Overdeck Family Foundation, including Laura Overdeck — an astrophysicist who created her own math program (Bedtime Math) for parents to work with their children.
“They envisioned this program and approached TCNJ President Catherine Foster and Suzanne McCotter (dean of education ). I give them all the credit in the world. Without them having this vision and without them coming together, this program would not exist. They truly believe in this program. They have been amazing.”
Bassett also points out the need for tutoring does not exist just in urban districts, such as Trenton and Newark, but in small communities and rural districts as well.
“Our rural scholars need just as much help as our urban scholars and they are an often-overlooked group,” she said. “They’re often forgotten. Having taught for 26 years in a rural school in Ocean City, I know how overlooked we often are. We have the same needs as those urban districts. We just don’t hear about us as much.”
Her dreams include expanding the offerings into Salem County and getting additional sites in Atlantic and Cumberland counties.
Anyone interested in the NJ Tutoring Corps can contact Bassett by phone at (609) 992-5532 or by email at bassettk@tcnj.edu.
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff