K-12
Recovering Forward: Learning Recovery That Reaches Every Student
Curriculum, tutoring, and summer programs may provide a path to success.
When the COVID-19 pandemic upended public education, it magnified inequities we failed to address for decades. It challenged policymakers, researchers, and educators to not only recover disrupted learning opportunities, but also to build a stronger, more equitable system. In the years since schools reopened, districts have leaned into a variety of recovery strategies. In a recently published report that I and my colleagues Megan Kuhfeld and Sarah Woulfin prepared for the National Academy of Education, we highlight three strategies that stood out for learning recovery: standards-aligned English language arts (ELA) curriculum, high-dosage tutoring, and summer learning programs. These approaches, funded largely through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) act, represent both evidence-based interventions and massive implementation challenges.
In our work, we focus on key factors to implement these strategies successfully—and what it takes to make them work equitably. What we found points to a simple but often overlooked truth: programs don’t implement themselves. Success hinges not just on what we choose, but how we make it real in schools.
The adoption of high-quality ELA curriculum has emerged as a foundational step in many districts’ recovery playbooks. These materials offer a coherent path for instruction, integrating research-based practices like phonemic awareness and vocabulary building with formative assessments and clear instructional guidance.
But coherence isn’t automatic. Teachers need time, training, and trust to shift their practice. Leaders need aligned systems to ensure consistency without rigidity. We’ve seen that where districts pair materials with deep professional learning and implementation support, students benefit. Where these supports are missing, curriculum reform risks becoming another missed opportunity.
Few interventions offer the same promise as high-dosage tutoring—short, focused sessions with trained tutors, delivered multiple times a week. Yet scaling tutoring is no small feat. Districts face persistent challenges with staffing, scheduling, and sustaining quality. Our analysis surfaced a key takeaway: districts that embedded tutoring into the school day, used consistent tutor-student pairings, and monitored implementation outcomes were more likely to see real gains. The best tutoring programs didn’t just fill time—they filled gaps.
Maybe second to tutoring, summer became a focal point for districts’ pandemic recovery efforts. Districts invested in summer programs that blend academic recovery with enrichment, recognizing that extended time must also be engaging. Still, summer success depends on early planning, community partnerships, and careful alignment with school-year priorities. Where these elements are in place, students reenter school better prepared.
Across all three strategies, four interrelated conditions consistently influence implementation of new programs: context, resources, people, and coherence. These aren’t new. They’re evergreen. But in this moment, they’re more urgent than ever.
We need to meet implementation where it lives—in districts, in classrooms, in community contexts. That means investing in the professionals who make policy work, aligning initiatives so they don’t compete for attention, and recognizing that even the best interventions require sustained support.
Just as districts began turning short-term recovery into long-term redesign, the U.S. Department of Education’s recent decision to rescind remaining ESSER funds shifted the landscape. The end of financial support from ESSER doesn’t just tighten budgets. It hinders districts’ ability to implement programs with fidelity. High-dosage tutoring, comprehensive summer programming, and sustained professional learning all depend on stable, predictable funding. The lack of financial support makes recovery and equity harder to achieve—and easier to abandon.
Still, the work doesn’t end here. Meaningful recovery can’t rely on emergency funding alone. We need new policy commitments that recognize implementation is a marathon, not a sprint—and that equity requires infrastructure, not just interventions.
We’ve seen what works. We know what it takes. The question is no longer what’s possible. It’s whether we have the collective will to keep moving forward without backsliding.
Andrew McEachin is the senior research director of policy research at ETS.