Robert Slavin’s final lecture, delivered April 10, 2021, marked a career milestone. The American Educational Research Association had bestowed the Johns Hopkins University research professor with its version of a lifetime achievement award “for distinguished contributions to research in education.” Previous recipients included such academic luminaries as Benjamin Bloom, Jean Piaget and James Coleman.
Scholars typically reflect on their life’s work in these speeches but Slavin had no interest in that kind of self-contemplation. Instead he plunged into the research evidence for his latest obsession: intensive, daily tutoring for millions of children from low-income families as a way to make up for the months of missed school during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s an audacious idea to give daily tutoring — something that seems too expensive for many upper middle class families — to impoverished children. But Slavin passionately argued that tutoring programs were at least four times more effective than all the other ways of helping kids catch up, listing the statistical effect sizes from his meta-analyses one by one.
This story about Robert Slavin was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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