Catching Up After COVID-19: Learning Loss Among Texas Students Incorporating the Implementation of House Bill 4545

Accountability for public schools continues to be a much-debated topic in educational policy. House Bill 4545 is a policy in Texas that brings many stipulations to public schools concerning students who are not meeting the state’s accountability standards. One of the standards this bill moved to the forefront of educational policy is accelerated instruction or 30 hours of intervention per subject for a student not meeting the standard for each grade level. This study looks at the application of the 30 hours of intervention through the option of summer school provided to middle school students to increase their math learning. This study uses the difference-in-difference model to determine if 30 hours of summer school tutoring impacts or positively influences the students’ learning. The study’s participants include one Texas school district’s fifth, sixth, and seventh-grade students who took the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) mathematics test in May of 2022 and have moved on to sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. The data for the students who participated in summer school were compared to those for those who did not attend summer school. The researcher analyzed each student's academic progress (MAP) testing data before and after treatment. The analysis also examines covariates of student performance, including race, gender, economic disadvantage, attendance, at-risk, special education indicator, and emergent bilingual.