Opinion | Learning loss is an epic education crisis. Here’s what to do about it.

The most effective way to combat learning loss is high-dosage tutoring — frequent, semi-individualized tutoring sessions that supplement regular classroom instruction. Every struggling student should be enrolled in such a program. But doing so would be hard.

The North Carolina Education Corps, a nonprofit that pairs North Carolina K-5 students with tutors, recommends that high-dosage tutoring be conducted in groups no larger than three and instructed by certified teachers or paraprofessionals — otherwise, its efficacy fades. This would require hiring lots of new teaching staff, and it would be expensive — the cost hovers around $4,000 per student every school year. Federal stimulus bills such as the American Rescue Plan Act have allotted billions of dollars toward helping schools recover from the pandemic, but these funds must stretch to cover an array of needs. Most local education boards have committed to spending about 3 percent of ARPA funds on tutoring and coaching, but this is not enough. If Illinois were to utilize its share of ARPA funding (about $5 billion) to finance high-dosage tutoring within the state, this programming would absorb almost 150 percent of that amount — and that’s just for one school year.

Covid-era learning loss is a national crisis of the highest order, and Congress should devote substantial new resources to fighting it. In the absence of sufficient federal funding, state and local governments should enroll as many students as possible into high-dosage tutoring programs that observe high standards for efficacy.

If they fall short, however, there are other options they should consider. One is peer tutoring. Recruiting older students to tutor younger ones encourages all parties to be active learners; student tutors can assist their peers while deepening their own understandings through pedagogy. Younger students are also more comfortable being taught by their schoolmates; this culture of trust can also ward off stigmatization and stereotyping.

Schools can offer academic credit to student tutors in lieu of salaried positions, making peer tutoring much cheaper to implement. Though this perk also emphasizes that peer tutors, while they can and should undergo training, are not professionals. They are children — with extracurricular clubs to attend, friendships to maintain, after-school jobs to work and other teenage responsibilities to worry about. It is unfair to rely on them to combat learning loss. But if school districts fail to institute universal high-dosage tutoring programs, second-best options will be the only ones available to address the most pressing educational emergency in generations.