A hard-fought lawsuit to bring more live teaching and better technology to the Los Angeles school system at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic is ending — five years later — with an agreement to provide tutoring and other supports to an estimated 100,000 students.
The length of the litigation means that no student of high school age when the pandemic began will be able to benefit.
A group of parents alleged in the suit that the L.A. Unified School District failed to meet state educational standards, disproportionately harming Black and Latino students.
The settlement “ensures that over 100,000 of the district’s most vulnerable students will have access to no fewer than 45 hours of high-dose tutoring per year,” the advocates said in a statement. “That amounts to over 10 million hours of guaranteed high-dose tutoring over the next three school years.”
Appropriate tutoring is defined as small groups of six or fewer students or one-on-one sessions aligned with the student’s classroom work. It would be available at least three times per week in 30 minutes sessions.
L.A. Unified declined to comment on the settlement. It had fought hard against the lawsuit, winning a dismissal in 2021 once campuses reopened. The parents, who have been supported by non-profits Parent Revolution and Innovate Public Schools, appealed. A state appeals court reinstated the case two years later.
“After all the time, effort and years invested in this lawsuit, this victory feels like a step in the right direction,” Maritza Gonzalez, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “From the start, it was about securing the support kids need to thrive academically. While it comes too late for my eldest son, now in college, I’m relieved to know that my daughter, just beginning high school, will have access to the tutoring she needs to succeed and prepare for college in the years ahead.”
What is in the settlement
The settlement, if approved by the court, also would require over the next three years:
- Regular assessments to determine which students need extra support
- Additional teacher training in math and English language arts instruction and how to support lower-achieving students
- Outreach to students who are missing too much school or who have dropped out
- “More robust, transparent and disaggregated” public reporting of tutoring, grades, assessment and absenteeism data.
- Annual evaluation of and reporting on the effectiveness of tutoring programs
It was not immediately clear how many of the settlement terms represent policies and actions already underway in the school system. The district, for example, already touts its efforts to improve student attendance and conducts regular assessments. It also provides extra funding and resources, including tutoring, to schools that serve the highest-need students.
Advocates said the tutoring required under the settlement and other measures go beyond what the district is otherwise offering.
An era of painful tradeoffs and setbacks
In 2020, when the surging pandemic brought death and uncertainty, state leaders struggled with how best to safeguard public health. It March of that year, campuses closed statewide — with instruction moving online. Campuses reopened on different timetables, according to decisions made by local school systems. L.A. Unified offered students optional on-campus instruction in April of 2021. The state required all public school campuses to reopen for the fall of 2021.
In California and across the country, researchers subsequently compiled massive evidence of delayed or lost learning during this period, with the academic damage affecting school populations even in places that re-opened campuses more quickly.
While campuses were closed, L.A. Unified reached an agreement with its teachers union that provided for less live instructional time compared with some other large districts in California, while also reducing the hours that teachers were required to work.
When the lawsuit was filed, plaintiff Judith Larson said her daughter, an honor roll student, received about two or three hours of instruction per week in the spring of 2020. Things improved slightly in the fall, but nowhere near enough for her daughter to catch up, she said.
The lawsuit also called attention to technology shortcomings, noting that students from low-income families, especially those in areas with poor connectivity, were especially challenged to take part in lessons, access materials and turn in work.
At the time, L.A. Unified spokeswoman Shannon Haber said that the district was working “to balance the sometimes conflicting priorities of the learning needs of students and the health and safety of all in the school community.”
L.A. Unified surged ahead of many other school systems in areas such as providing free meals for pick-up at campuses and weekly COVID testing once campuses had reopened.
Officials at the time defended the district’s efforts to provide technology — and in key respects, the nation’s second-largest school system outpaced many other places. The district, for example, cornered the local market on computers to send home with students, quickly buying them ahead of other school systems. The district also provided internet hotspots to help students get online.
But the digital divide separating the prosperous from the low-income was so vast that these efforts fell short. Many students lived in locations where the hotspots did not work. Many students were struggling to complete schoolwork on cellphones that they shared with other family members.
The district’s gradually improving state test scores suggest there has been progress in recent years.
These scores have finally moved above levels from before the pandemic. The improvement has been too slow in the view of some observers, although many other schools systems have yet to catch up pre-pandemic achievement.
The post LAUSD settles suit to help students with pandemic learning setbacks — 5 years after disruption appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
