The hard-up find it hardest
Kiana Jones took a summer job at a trampoline park, supervising birthday parties and keeping an eye out for overzealous bouncers. This season Ms Jones, an undergraduate in Tennessee, is spending seven weeks in a community centre drilling children in reading and maths. She is one of around 600 locals swiftly assembled by the Tennessee Tutoring Corps, a charity set up in May by a former state governor to help children who have missed months of school.
The challenge is huge. Lessons from the year now ending remain untaught. When children spend any significant time out of school , they tend to forget some of what they have already learnt. Analysts at, an American test-provider, reckon that by autumn some children will be a year behind in maths. Others are expanding existing summer programmes. New York City is requiring about 100,000 students to enroll in online summer schools, twice as many as last year. The difficulty is that children often fail to turn up to real summer schools frequently enough to benefit from them. It is even harder to ensure they attend lessons conducted online.
Robert Slavin, director of the Centre for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University, would like America to mount a federally funded tutoring programme. Trained graduates could be deployed in teams to each American school, beginning with those whose students have been worst affected by the closures. They could teach pupils one-to-one or in small groups. A few American politicians like the idea but the government has shown no interest in doing anything on this scale.
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