At East Oakland Pride Elementary School in Oakland, California, some fifth graders are asked to arrange colorful plastic counters into two rows of four, with three off to the side.
One student stacks up the counters instead, while another watches and giggles.
“Can someone tell me what expression we just made?” asks Yvette Munguia, the math tutor leading the lesson. “What is two times four?”
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“Eight,” murmurs one student.
“Plus three?” she asks.
Silence.
With Munguia’s patient coaching, the students — who scored several grades below the 5th-grade level in math — work their way through the exercise. As they work together on the order of operations, they take long pauses to puzzle over basic addition and subtraction.
Munguia is one of more than 20 math tutors working in Oakland Unified Schools this year. Called math “Liberators,” tutors like Munguia were recruited and trained as part of a partnership between the school district and the nonprofit Oakland REACH. The parent-led math tutoring model follows the success of the Oakland REACH’s Literacy Liberator program, which produced similar gains in reading as instruction from classroom teachers, according to a 2023 report.
The math Liberator program is a direct response to parent demand. In 2021, Oakland REACH surveyed district families about what they wanted and needed for their children. More than 80% asked for math tutoring.
Both REACH and OUSD wanted to follow up with a very specific type of tutoring. They sought to engage parents and other guardians in learning more about how the district teaches math and how they can employ that approach at home with their children.
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During two evening workshops, parents were encouraged to confront their own insecurities about math. Math educators talked about the importance of building confidence in mathematical ability, particularly for students of color. Oakland REACH shared data, including the fact that only about one in 10 students of color in Oakland are performing at or above grade level in math this year. Data points like this are important, but they also reinforce the myth that students of color aren’t good at math, the group was told. To support students, it’s critical to flip that narrative. The way forward is a “growth mindset” — tutoring with positivity and confidence.
What came next was MathBOOST, a campaign to train and hire math tutors from the community — no experience necessary. The goal was twofold: support children with high-dosage math tutoring while providing paid opportunities for parents and caregivers.
“It should be the district’s responsibility to support students, and why not show families that they’re already doing this at home and they can do it in a way that pays them money?,” explained OUSD STEM coordinator Edgar Rodriguez-Ramirez. The district depends on volunteers to support teachers in classrooms, he said, but more often than not volunteers are from white, affluent neighborhoods.
Part of shifting the narrative about student intellectual capacity is to invite family members to be present in the school, Rodriguez-Ramirez said.
“Families that have been wanting to volunteer in school have the opportunity to work,” he said. “They know how to raise their children. Now they’re adding value to the community.”
Oakland REACH and district staff trained tutors based on the National Student Support Accelerator’s high-impact tutoring program, which requires weekly small-group support, close monitoring of student progress, alignment with district curriculum and oversight by school staff.
During her tutor training, Mungia and other prospective math tutors met on Tuesday and Thursday nights for five weeks — with dinners provided — followed by two more days of professional development. District and REACH staff worked together to train the tutors to use iReady, an online assessment and teaching platform that the district uses to personalize student academic support.
Now as a tutor at East Oakland Pride, Munguia has access to the same diagnostic student assessments that classroom teachers use and can pull lessons from the district’s math curriculum to help students catch up. Using that information, she can target where each student in the small groups she meets with need practice and support.
The students seem excited to work with her. Some show up early and have to wait their turn. In addition to her natural patience and ease with math — not to mention the stickers she hands out on Fridays — Munguia’s roots in the neighborhood are an added asset for the job. Having attended OUSD schools herself, Munguia speaks fluent Spanish. She lives close by and her nine-year-old daughter attends another local area public school.
“She has the trust of the students,” said East Oakland Pride Principal Michelle Grant. “And if you don’t have that, you don’t have anything. She’s good at what she does.”
Munguia previously worked as a caregiver and an instructional assistant at a community college in Oakland. She was looking for another job related to education when she saw an ad for the tutoring program on the job site Indeed. She had never taught math to young children, so her success with students at East Oakland Pride is a testament to REACH’s training.
“Liberators are proof that our communities are full of assets we can no longer afford to sideline if we want to fix a broken educational system,” said REACH founder and CEO Lakisha Young.
Thalia Ward, 25, graduated from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo three years ago and applied for a tutoring job because she wanted to go into teaching.
The first step in the training, she said, was called a Fellowship. During their bi-weekly meetings, the tutors in training discussed readings they’d been given in advance.
“We worked through the different ways we learned math and how kids are learning math today,” Ward said. They heard from tutors who had started the previous year and also visited a veteran math teacher who was giving a summer school lesson.
“We saw that when expectations are high, students are more likely to exceed standards. A lot of us are working with students who are behind grade level, but that’s a sign that we should hold them to expectations. They need more personal time with an adult.”
Recruiting grandparents and caregivers
REACH developed Literacy Liberators in the fall of 2022 to supplement and support instruction during the pandemic, partnering with the school district and literacy nonprofit FluentSeeds to recruit parents, caregivers and community members to deliver tutoring. It’s a unique model, district leaders say, because it combines high-dosage tutoring with family and community engagement.
“I don’t know of another model where you’re recruiting grandparents and caregivers, giving them a job, uplifting them to show the leadership skills to improve instruction,” said Rodriguez-Ramirez. “This model reclaims what it means to have a community school.”
Tutors work from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every day that school is open, he said, and earn between $16.33 and $19.17 an hour, with benefits.
Like Literacy Liberator model tutors, Math Liberators are encouraged to use their personal experiences with school in their work. Whether they found school difficult or relatively easy, personal experiences deepen tutors’ commitment to the job and to meeting student needs, one study found.
“It’s been a while since I was in elementary [school] myself,” said Munguia, who is 30. “I remember feeling shy, not wanting to speak up. I’m seeing the shy students and I can relate.”
While literacy tutors focus on students in kindergarten through third grade, math tutors work with third through fifth graders. Small groups — no bigger than four students — are still the model, but the math tutoring has a bigger emphasis on a “growth mindset,” since so many students, regardless of academic performance, don’t think they’re good at math.
“We don’t all have to be ‘math people’ to help our kids,” Rodgriguez-Ramirez said. “We wanted to address that math can be hard, but it’s because we didn’t learn it the same way.”
During the parent workshops, families worked through the math problems that their children were learning so they would recognize their children’s homework. Helping children with math, Rodriguez-Ramirez said, doesn’t necessarily mean knowing the answers. It might mean figuring the problems out together.
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“We want the kids to hear the same message at home,” he said. “Let’s talk about math without leaving it in the school.”
The program started in four schools, but this year it has expanded to 11 sites, with plans to grow further — not just in the number of tutors, but in their professional development as well. Tutors will receive continuous coaching, Rodrigues-Ramirez said, in pedagogy, including how to differentiate instruction for varying skill levels within a group.
REACH will also begin a virtual math tutoring pilot program in January, offering online tutoring to Black and Hispanic families in Oakland and Rochester, New York.
When school first started in September, Munguia helped classroom teachers during math instruction and got to know the students, said David Braden, instructional math lead at East Oakland Pride.
“She got to see the expectations for math, which are very high, and these kids have scored several grade levels below,” he said. And she’ll be getting deeper training in how to work with kids at different levels. “The trick is calibrating the instruction to align with what diagnostics say.”
Munguia appreciates the opportunity the program has given her. She has two associate’s degrees from Laney College in Oakland, one in Language Arts and the second in photography. She has no formal teaching experience but said she would love to be a classroom teacher someday.
“I’m ecstatic working here,” she said. “I wish I could help all of the kids, but I can only have four at a time.”
Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to The Oakland REACH and The 74.