With every investment K-12 school districts make, we should ask ourselves: Is it helping our students grow and succeed? This should guide how we spend our dollars, particularly as we partner with service providers for tutoring, curriculum and other academic support.

Yet under most traditional contracts, districts pay without any explicit guarantees that the provider will deliver the results we want, or that our students need. Outcomes-based contracting (OBC) offers a different approach, building in mutual accountability from the start.

In Hamburg, we’ve seen the difference as we’ve expanded high-impact tutoring (HIT). Through the LEARNS Act, our state is providing grant funding to public school districts and open-enrollment public charter schools to provide HIT to eligible K-12 students. That investment matters, especially for districts like ours that often don’t have enough local educators to deliver intensive in-school tutoring to students who need it.

Funding HIT is only part of it. We have to make sure it’s implemented well so it works for kids, families and teachers. With support from Forward Arkansas and the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, the Hamburg School District developed an OBC that ties a portion........

© Arkansas Online