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Hello from Erica and on Chalkbeat’s national desk. This week’s big story highlights recent research that suggests a way to make tutoring more effective. We’ve also got the latest on Tennessee’s school district takeover, Los Angeles Unified’s plan to limit screens in schools, and out-of-school disparities that pile up for children in poverty. 

How to make tutoring work, at scale, is one of the big questions in education as school systems reckon with declines in student learning that have persisted beyond the pandemic. 

In Knox County, Tennessee, for example, district leaders thought they were doing everything right. The district used a well-regarded, evidence-based reading curriculum. Struggling students got tutoring during the school day and participation was high. Tutors were equipped with high-quality supplemental materials. 

But the results disappointed the district. As Erin Phillips, the district’s director of literacy and learning, put it, too many students were ending up as “intervention lifers,” never exiting tutoring programs that were meant to be a short-term boost to get students on track.

Phillips worked with independent researchers to test a hunch about what was going wrong. The district randomly assigned struggling readers to tutors who used either the district’s regular supplemental materials or materials aligned with the core curriculum. The students whose tutoring reinforced their classroom lessons did better, experiencing the equivalent of 1.3 months of additional learning.

That might sound like common sense. But it goes against a widespread way of thinking about intervention: that if students didn’t learn the material well in class, they might benefit from new ways of approaching it or different explanations of the same concepts.

In reality, small things like referring to a  “magic e” in one setting and a “silent e” in another or teaching different letter sounds in different orders were confusing students. 

“What we were asking our most at-risk learners to do is carry the heaviest cognitive load,” Phillips said. 

The education sector jargon for this is “coherence.” It really does matter. But experts say many districts don’t need to buy new curriculum to achieve it. They probably have what they need within their core curriculum, as long as they’re already using something good.

Read the full story here.

Pennsylvania history teacher Leon Smith is the 2026 national teacher of the year. Chalkbeat spoke with Smith about his favorite history lesson, being the only Black male teacher in his school, and why he hopes young people go into teaching. 

The U.S. Supreme Court is taking up a Colorado case with implications for the evolving line between church and state. Private providers in Colorado’s universal preschool program have to abide by nondiscrimination requirements. Catholic preschools say that impinges on their religious freedom to educate families that share their values. Some states’ voucher programs have similar nondiscrimination requirements. The Catholic preschools’ arguments build on a series of cases that have expanded the rights of religious organizations to access public funds.

Los Angeles Unified School District’s board voted this week to set screen time limits by grade level, a reaction to the rising calls nationwide for schools to cut back on technology.

The action by the country’s second largest school district might indicate growing support for the movement to expose children to fewer screens, particularly young children. Los Angeles’ school board in its resolution directed district staff to develop a policy before the upcoming school year.

The policy, according to the resolution passed by the board on Tuesday, will banish devices in the classroom through first grade, except for assessments, and set daily and weekly maximum screen time limits by grade.

Tuesday’s resolution comes while the district navigates without a permanent superintendent. The district placed Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on paid administrative leave in February following an FBI raid on the district leader’s home and offices. 

Carvalho has been a champion of technology in education. (The ongoing FBI investigation reportedly relates to an ed tech company; Carvalho has not been charged with any crime.) NBC News reports that when parents complained about screen time in the fall, Carvalho dismissed their concerns.

Carvalho acknowledged that Americans have an addiction to screens, but said “schools are not the reason, not even close. Parental responsibility is very much a part of this equation.”

Several states are mulling screen bans or limits in schools. Tennessee is among them. A bill the General Assembly considered would have banned devices like Chromebooks in the classroom, but lawmakers significantly dialed back the proposal that eventually passed, allowing schools to set their own policies.

That’s how much less investment in their overall well-being and development children from low-income families experience relative to their more affluent peers, according to a new study. 

Researchers looked at everything from housing and nutrition to formal schooling and parents’ time, and put dollar amounts on all of those things. Public spending on the education of children in poverty is actually slightly greater than spending on the education of more affluent children, but disparities pile up among the many out-of-school factors that affect how children learn and grow.