But federal pandemic relief money that helped fuel the expansion of such programs dried up in September, and recent research has sparked debates about the high-impact tutoring’s effectiveness when implemented at scale. This includes an evaluation of that reported small gains for students and a that showed challenges in maintaining . 

Still, our experience in implementing and evaluating high-impact tutoring programs shows that if states and school districts get creative with funding and focus on implementing key evidence-based practices, they can achieve the positive outcomes for students that research shows are possible. 

This summer, our organizations hosted a to help 10 geographically and demographically diverse school districts build and sustain these kinds of programs. It was inspiring to see their commitment to overcoming barriers and seeking innovative solutions. Here’s what some school districts are doing this year:

Being creative with funding and committing their own resources. Recent estimates suggest it would cost to provide intensive tutoring for 20% of students. Cutting-edge technologies, like AI-assisted tutoring, may eventually help reduce costs, but securing sustainable funding for high-impact tutoring is challenging. To fill budget holes, school districts are investing their own taxpayer dollars and exploring other federal funding streams, including for specific student populations, such as children from low-income families or with special needs; Americorps; and the. 

For example, Lincoln Parish Schools in Louisiana combined local money with Title I and — Individuals With Disabilities Education Act — funding to pilot high-impact tutoring in its schools in 2021. A state grant and federal pandemic relief funds helped continue the program. For the 2024-25 school year, it’s using a, as well as Title I and IDEA funds. 

Ector County Independent School District in Texas made significant cuts to its 2024-25 budget to close a $24 million deficit but decided to maintain funding for high-impact tutoring, based on ts positive results. During the 2022-23 school year, who had scored below grade level on the previous state assessment and received at least 20 hours of tutoring scored at grade level or higher after one year. This year, the district is using $2 million in Title I funds to pay for this service in elementary and middle schools, and state compensatory education funds for its high school programs.

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education in Washington, D.C., is paying for high-impact tutoring with a , philanthropic dollars and by partnering with local colleges and universities for tutors funded through the . 

A number of states are helping with funding, including by building high-impact tutoring into broader initiatives. Oregon is using its state-funded initiative to require district grantees to use the approach to improve reading skills. Tennessee is including it in its funding formula. Districts have also found ways to incorporate it into existing school programs. For example, Baltimore City Public Schools has included it as one of the .

Investing in evidence-based programs to maximize funding. States and school districts can increase the impact of their funding by directing it toward evidence-based practices. Our organizations have developed a showing school districts how to prioritize evidence in grants and contracts. After participating in our sprint, Florida a new high-impact tutoring initiative and required providers to meet in order to qualify for state funding. The that programs funded through a $30 million state investment follow evidence-based practices and gather data on student outcomes, broken out by demographics. Another sprint team is exploring a contracting approach that focuses on the performance of its tutoring provider – . 

Making informed implementation decisions. Evidence-based high-impact tutoring that incorporates , such as one-on-one or small-group sessions held at least three times a week during school hours, can increase learning across all grade levels. But districts sometimes deviate from these principles due to local needs and resources. For example, many districts struggle to fit high-impact tutoring into the school day, opting instead to hold sessions outside regular hours, which can reduce attendance and effectiveness. Implementation choices must remain research-based to ensure strong outcomes.

Focusing on continuous improvement. Less than half of the teams participating in our summer program entered with a strong understanding of best practices for evaluating programs. Planning for data collection from the start is essential for assessing and improving program effectiveness. While can be intimidating, it is a vital part of any new learning approach. For example, based on the findings from its , Metro Nashville Public Schools improved elements of its high-impact tutoring program, including improving communications with tutors.

The funding and implementation challenges of the current moment must not become an excuse for sidelining high-impact tutoring. We encourage students to persevere in the face of challenges and to learn from feedback. The education community must do the same regarding high-impact tutoring. It will take time and hard work to get this right at scale, but with high-impact tutoring, schools can give students the support they need to thrive.

Community-based organizations may be eager to jump in to tutor students, recruit volunteers and hire staff to work in schools. But they’d be doing a disservice by not first taking a step back to consider the challenges and requirements to do this work well.

I’ve worn many hats in education: classroom teacher, district office leader, community organization leader and now as a managing director at Accelerate. When these groups work together to serve students, magic can happen — creating opportunity and access for those most in need.

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But simply placing extra adults in the building is insufficient. An organization’s support must be grounded in research-backed, academically driven strategies. Good intentions, though a necessary starting point, aren’t enough to change academic outcomes.

In 2023-24, Accelerate invested in organizations providing tutoring during the school day. Of the students served, 97% qualified for free and reduced-price school lunch, 1 in 4 were English learners and 90% identified as Hispanic, Black or Native American. Here are six hard truths for community-based organizations about what it takes to make a real impact on student outcomes:

An impressive, longstanding record of youth service and/or family engagement doesn’t guarantee academic success. Just because your organization excels at mentoring, character development or after-school activities, that doesn’t mean you’ll seamlessly transition to in-school support. Consider things like legally required accommodations for students with documented disabilities, the constraints of schools’ master schedules and interpretation of complex academic data.

Schools need you now more than ever — don’t try to wing it. The learning loss crisis is real, and students need support that works. Start by identifying local schools’ specific needs, such as early literacy or middle school math. Then, follow the evidence on program design for effective high-dosage tutoring. Factors like subject areas, number of students served, grade level and a tutor’s training and experiences should inform your approach. This clarity is essential for realistically assessing your ability to determine which proven programs or academic partners best meet student needs and align with existing school interventions.

Be ready for accountability. It’s great that your work feels good, but does it actually do good? Be prepared for schools and funders to demand accountability for academic outcomes. Identify metrics for gauging your progress, execute necessary data sharing agreements with districts and then regularly analyze the data to mine for students’ individual skill and knowledge gaps in order to continuously advance their learning. Even better, agree upon specific academic targets with districts and schools in advance and use them to guide decisions about the model.

For example, Accelerate partner Read USA implemented an in-school tutoring program using a sophisticated progress monitoring and data collection system to set individual student objectives and provide tutors with with explicit next steps to address the specific skills (e.g., phonics, comprehension, fluency) in which their student needs extra practice. This real-time data formed the basis for a small-scale randomized controlled trial to measure impact on learning.

You need time to plan — more than you think. School support for a tutoring initiative can ensure a strong implementation. So build in a planning year, or at least a full semester, to get principals, teachers and other staff on board. Many critical decisions will need to be made: the students to be served, subject area(s), scheduling, tutor selection, etc. To guarantee success, these conversations must happen early and often.

For example, Accelerate grantee Compass spent a full school year planning a tutoring program for predominantly Native American elementary school students in Rapid City, South Dakota. They retained a coordinator with deep educational experience and ties to the local school system and identified a proven model that could be easily implemented by a diverse set of tutors. In the first year, Compass’s program reached some 200 students across four schools, with 85% receiving at least 90 minutes of English Language Arts tutoring a week from October 2023 to May 2024. This is more than many for-profit vendors provide.

Leverage your strengths and acknowledge your weaknesses. Build on what you’ve got: expertise with specific age groups, relationships with schools, families and neighborhoods or a pool of capable tutors. But don’t assume your skills are enough. Just because your organization successfully mentors children, that doesn’t mean you can teach them algebra. You need genuine academic expertise, if your organization doesn’t already have it. Consider hiring a coordinator with intervention experience or purchase a proven program or curriculum that comes with robust training for tutors. Hire academic experts, pay for professional development and commit to serious learning. There’s no shortcut to understanding how to teach core academic content.

Start small, prove your worth, then grow smartly. Begin with a manageably sized program, demonstrate your value by using data and grow by using digital tools to track both student progress and tutor attendance, while maintaining what works. When word spreads that you are improving outcomes, more schools will come knocking. But if their goals diverge from your organization’s — aka mission creep — you should pass on the opportunity to scale for scaling’s sake.

High-dosage tutoring is a serious academic intervention with specific guardrails. Schools and students need community-based organizations to come armed with enthusiasm and equipped with content knowledge, best-practice implementation, proven models and preparedness for challenges. The path isn’t easy, but the potential impact is immense. Accelerate’s newly republished report and playbook can help organizations plan and bridge the gap between community support and academic success. It’s time to turn good intentions into great results.

The White House, which has faced criticism for not doing enough for students who fell dramatically behind in math and reading, had something to show for it Thursday. An estimated 323,000 college students, volunteers and school staff signed up — not only exceeding the administration’s goal, but hitting it ahead of schedule. 

“This problem is not getting solved by somebody in Washington D.C. We launched the vision. We sent out money,” Deputy Secretary of Education Cindy Marten said at an event to celebrate the milestone. But those resources, she said, “helped to galvanize” volunteers and staff at the local level. “I’m proud that we can see the results of this collective effort.”

In the 2023-24 school year, over a quarter of principals reported offering more tutoring, mentoring or other support services than they did the previous year, according to a of over a thousand school leaders released ahead of the event. In all, roughly 24,500 schools added an average of 5.5 additional adults focused on supporting students.

While it’s too early to determine what effect the extra help had on student performance, over 30% of principals said they were able to employ research-backed, high-dosage tutoring, according to from the Rand Corp. That means trained tutors worked with the same students over time for at least 90 minutes per week.

Demand for tutors has received significant national attention, given students’ steep decline in learning. But the White House count also reflects a variety of added positions, including mentors to help re-engage chronically absent students and those who help students navigate college applications. About $20 million in federal relief money, flowing through AmeriCorps, the national service organization, fueled the partnership’s work. Districts also dipped in to other COVID funding to support the extra positions.

But the initiative, led by the National Partnership for Student Success at Johns Hopkins University, faces an uncertain future. Districts are using up what’s left of that money, and Republicans want to for AmeriCorps, as they have for years.

“One hundred percent depends on the election,” said Robert Balfanz, the Johns Hopkins professor who leads the partnership. He expects the effort to continue “in some form” if Vice President Kamala Harris wins. 

It’s unclear whether Donald Trump would do the same, but the educational effects of the pandemic will linger regardless of who’s in office, he said. 

“We have kids that are disengaged. We have kids that have greater out-of-school problems. We have kids that are more confused about what they want to do after high school,” Balfanz said. “It’s very hard to address those kids with your school staff alone.” 

Launched six months after U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona issued the charge for more tutors, the initiative serves as a hub for connecting local groups and individuals to schools that need them. Some leaders from the partnership’s national network of 200 districts have tried new strategies to motivate students.

In hopes of reducing a chronic absenteeism rate of about 30%, Principal Scott Hale at Johnstown High School, north of Albany, New York, tapped existing staff members, like teaching assistants, secretaries and coaches, to serve as mentors.

“Success mentors” at the school are matched with students to better understand why they’re absent and what incentives might lure them back. Keeping track of absences on a simple paper calendar drives home how quickly they can add up, Hale said.

“Many students don’t realize how many days they have missed until they see it,” he said. Reducing schoolwide chronic absenteeism has been tough, he added. But over half of the 125 students with mentors increased their attendance. “To see a kid improve from 80 absences to 30 is a huge win for us.”

‘Must be doing the right thing’ 

College students, who saw their own educations disrupted by the pandemic, have been integral to school recovery efforts, said Josh Fryday, for California Volunteers. 

“This generation experienced COVID in high school,” Fryday said. “I think they understand how important it is to be connected and have this extra support.”

Devin Blankenship was among those who signed up for the organization’s College Corps. She was earning a degree in sociology from Vanguard University, south of Los Angeles, and wanted some nonprofit experience. To avoid commuting through Los Angeles traffic, she took a virtual tutoring position with Los Angeles-based Step Up Tutoring. 

Over the next year, she worked with a third grader from the Los Angeles Unified School District whose reading skills had been so severely impacted by school closures that he barely knew letter sounds. Before she could focus on a lesson, another student confided in Blankenship about getting bullied at school.

“Students told me they were excited to come to tutoring for that hour,” she said. “I said, ‘Wow, I must be doing the right thing.’ ” 

Blankenship’s experience also points to some of the challenges tutors have faced, especially in a district as large as Los Angeles. At times, she didn’t know where to go with questions about helping a student or working with a family. She said she had to initiate Zoom or phone calls with her supervisor for answers. 

There were also moments when she felt ill-equipped to help. She recalls watching YouTube videos on improper fractions late at night while trying to meet a midnight deadline for a college paper.

“I was like, ‘Man, I wish there were tutoring sessions for me,’ ” she said.

With interest in a career in education, she sometimes felt frustrated that she didn’t have more interaction with students’ teachers. But those limitations didn’t drive Blankenship away. She now works as a teaching assistant in a special education class at Palms Elementary School in Perris, California, east of Los Angeles. She’s part of a program that fast-tracks interns into classroom positions to help address a teaching shortage.

‘Solved the problem’ 

In addition to giving future teachers practical experience, the national effort has spawned connections between tutoring organizations and college students looking for work. 

Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, struggled while schools were closed to find community service jobs for its students. Then an official who runs its federal work-study program learned about Step Up Tutoring through a local .

Pepperdine was “really interested in partnering with Step Up because we solved the problem for them,” said Sam Olivieri, Step Up’s CEO. “We were able during COVID to fill those community service slots through a virtual program.”

Word of their partnership spread and Step Up Tutoring now draws college students from 17 institutions. Virtual tutoring options have helped universities meet Cardona’s 2023 for higher education leaders to spend 15% of their work-study funds on community service — more than double the .

Olivieri thinks that the higher commitment from colleges to helping K-12 students will be a “durable” impact of the partnership’s work. 

Rand’s data shows that despite the additional funding and personnel, a third of principals said only some of the students who needed the services received them.

“The waters are not receding,” Balfanz said at the event. “The challenge remains.”

The open-source tool, which researchers say other educators can recreate and integrate into their tutoring systems, made the human tutors slightly more effective. And the weakest tutors became nearly as effective as their more highly-rated peers, according to a study . 

The tool, dubbed Tutor CoPilot, prompts tutors to think more deeply about their interactions with students, offering different ways to explain concepts to those who get a problem wrong. It also suggests hints or different questions to ask.

The new study offers a middle ground in what’s become a polarized debate between supporters and detractors of AI tutoring. It’s also the first randomized controlled trial — the gold standard in research — to examine a human-AI system in live tutoring. In all, about 1,000 students got help from about 900 tutors, and students who worked with AI-assisted tutors were four percentage points more likely to master the topic after a given session than those in a control group whose tutors didn’t work with AI.

Students working with lower-rated tutors saw their performance jump more than twice as much, by nine percentage points. In all, their pass rate went from 56% to 65%, nearly matching the 66% pass rate for students with higher-rated tutors.

The cost to run it: Just $20 per student per year — an estimate of what it costs Stanford to maintain accounts on Open AI’s GPT-4 large language model.

The study didn’t probe students’ overall math skills or directly tie the tutoring results to standardized test scores, but Rose E. Wang, the project’s lead researcher, said higher pass rates on the post-tutoring “mini tests” correlate strongly with better results on end-of-year tests like state math assessments. 

Wang said the study’s key insight was looking at reasoning patterns that good teachers engage in and translating them into “under the hood” instructions that tutors can use to help students think more deeply and solve problems themselves. 

“If you prompt ChatGPT, ‘Hey, help me solve this problem,’ it will typically just give away the answer, which is not at all what we had seen teachers do when we were showing them real examples of struggling students,” she said.

Essentially, the researchers prompted GPT-4 to behave like an experienced teacher and generate hints, explanations and questions for tutors to try out on students. By querying the AI, Wang said, tutors have “real-time” access to helpful strategies that move students forward.

”At any time when I’m struggling as a tutor, I can request help,” Wang said.

She said the system as tested is “not perfect” and doesn’t yet emulate the work of experienced teachers. While tutors generally found it helpful — particularly its ability to provide “well-phrased explanations,” clarify difficult topics and break down complex concepts on the spot — in a few cases, tutors said the tool’s suggestions didn’t align with students’ grade levels. 

A common complaint among tutors was that Tutor CoPilot’s responses were sometimes “too smart,” requiring them to simplify and adapt for clarity.

“But it is much better than what would have otherwise been there,” Wang said, “which was nothing.”

Researchers analyzed more than half a million messages generated during sessions, finding that tutors who had access to the AI tool were more likely to ask helpful questions and less eager to simply give students answers, two practices aligned with high-quality teaching.

Amanda Bickerstaff, co-founder and CEO of , said she was pleased to see a well-designed study on the topic focused on economically disadvantaged students, minority students, and English language learners.  

She also noted the benefits to low-rated tutors, saying other industries like consulting are already using generative AI to close skills gaps. As the technology advances, Bickerstaff said, most of its benefit will be in tasks like problem solving and explanations. 

Susanna Loeb, executive director of Stanford’s National Student Support Accelerator and one of the report’s authors, said the idea of using AI to augment tutors’ talents, not replace them, seems a smart use of the technology for the time being. “Who knows? Maybe AI will get better,” she said. “We just don’t think it’s quite there yet.”

At the moment, there are lots of essential jobs in fields like tutoring, health care and the like where practitioners “haven’t had years of education — and they don’t go to regular professional development,” she said. This approach, which offers a simple interface and immediate feedback, could be useful in those situations. 

“The big dream,” said Wang, “is to be able to enhance the human.”

Benjamin Riley, a frequent AI-in-education skeptic who leads the AI-focused think tank and writes a on the topic, applauded the study’s rigorous design, an approach he said prompts “effortful thinking on the part of the student.”

“If you are an inexperienced or less-effective tutor, having something that reminds you of these practices — and then you actually employ those actions with your students — that’s good,” he said. “If this holds up in other use cases, then I think you’ve got some real potential here.”

Riley sounded a note of caution about the tool’s actual cost. It may cost Stanford just $20 per student to run the AI, but he noted that tutors received up to three weeks of training to use it. “I don’t think you can exclude those costs from the analysis. And from what I can tell, this was based on a pretty thoughtful approach to the training.”

He also said students’ modest overall math gains raises the question, beyond the efficacy of the AI, of whether a large tutoring intervention like this has “meaningful impacts” on student learning. 

Similarly, Dan Meyer, who writes a on education and technology and co-hosts a on teaching math, noted that the gains “don’t seem massive, but they’re positive and at fairly low cost.”

He said the Stanford developers “seem to understand the ways tutors work and the demands on their time and attention.” The new tool, he said, seems to save them from spending a lot of effort to get useful feedback and suggestions for students.

Stanford’s Loeb said the AI’s best use is determining what a student knows and needs to know. But people are better at caring, motivating and engaging — and celebrating successes. “All people who have been tutors know that that is a key part about what makes tutoring effective. And this kind of approach allows both to happen.”

I have always enjoyed working with students and felt it is a way to give back to the community. 

When I enrolled at the University of Southern California two years ago, I kept up the tutoring, bringing my skills to elementary schools in the low income neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. 

What I quickly noticed was, despite the San Gabriel Valley being only 20 miles away from South Central LA, there was a huge disparity in literacy levels. 

The kids in the Valley could read at far more advanced levels than the kids in South Central. And the test scores confirmed what I saw in the classroom.

According to , 77% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading in the Arcadia Unified School District, in the Valley where I tutored; and 76% tested at or above that level for math. 

Compare that with the literacy levels for , where 43% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 36% tested at or above that level for math. 

During my first semester tutoring in South Central, I had a 4th grade student who struggled to read. 

As I continued my time tutoring in South Central, I realized many of my students struggled with reading and pronouncing words. I spoke to teachers who told me that the pandemic took a toll on learning. 

Some students struggled to focus on their work during online classes. And many struggled with disruption and trauma caused by the pandemic, teachers said.  

But I found there were ways that I could help these kids learn to read. 

I focused my lesson plans on phonics, the building blocks of words. We focused on pronouncing different letter combinations with a phonics book as my chosen curriculum. It turned out that my decision to focus on phonics made a huge difference.  

I used phonics to teach reading because it helped me guide my students. While I know all the pronunciations and word combinations, I didn’t have a list of sounds or letter combinations to teach, so a phonics textbook helped with giving my lessons structure.

As it turns out, districts around the country are embracing phonics as part of a movement in teaching called “the science of reading,” which relies on letter recognition and sounding out words to teach literacy. New York City has rolled out a phonics-based curriculum and Los Angeles Unified is in the process of doing so.

A number of states have laws to mandate the science of reading, but an  in California failed last year. Still, educators and districts are free to use the tools of phonics in their lessons. 

Through my phonics-based lessons, my students started to increase their literacy level, and reading became easier for them. However, one tutor can only do so much. 

There are many variables that can contribute to the educational chasm. The average household income for the is $115,525, and the average household income for  is $64,927, according to Point2Homes. Wealth puts some students ahead academically. 

From my experience, I know that many families in the San Gabriel Valley hire tutors to ensure their children stay on track and perhaps even surpass the educational requirements of their schools. 

But although students in the San Gabriel Valley have more financial resources, that doesn’t mean LAUSD elementary students can’t meet or exceed San Gabriel Valley’s test scores. 

To increase literacy rates in South Central schools, I believe that teachers and parents should create a culture where students are encouraged to read more. Students should view reading as something fun rather than work. 

While tutors can facilitate the reading process, students need to be self-motivated. Tutors can help students pronounce words and teach them the basic building blocks of reading. However, if students don’t read on their own time, they can’t take their skills to the next level. 

That’s why it’s so important for teachers and families to impart kids with a love of reading. The combination of phonics and a genuine interest in reading creates lifelong learners.

The flood of resources was backed by an extensive body of evidence. Dozens of studies conducted before the pandemic showed that the positive effects of tutoring were among the largest ever seen in education policy. To help a generation of young learners return to their pre-COVID trajectory, advocates argued, there appeared to be no strategy more effective than recruiting thousands of tutors to provide regular supplemental instruction. 

But a shared exclusively with ���˶��� raises doubts about whether the remarkable learning gains measured in prior studies can actually be produced by the kinds of large-scale initiatives that have been launched since 2020. Released Monday, the wide-ranging overview of over 250 high-quality studies finds that as tutoring programs grow, their impact steadily shrinks. 

The findings, which are predominantly drawn from pre-COVID papers, dovetail with disappointing results of some local efforts that have been undertaken in the pandemic’s wake. They also reflect the well-acknowledged reality — observed throughout education research and the social sciences more generally — that the enormous benefits sometimes seen in highly controlled settings are seldom if ever carried over to larger populations. 

Study author Matthew Kraft, an economist at Brown University the spread of tutoring, said that the promise of the approach should not be eclipsed by the “high, and sometimes outsized, expectations” attached to it.

“We have to be realistic about how hard it is to do anything well in education out of the gate, let alone make fundamental changes to the core structures of teaching and learning,” he said.

of the boost stemming from “high-impact” tutoring, which emphasizes one-on-one or small-group instruction in large doses, have been sizable — about as much as an entire year of reading growth for elementary schoolers, and twice that seen by high school freshmen, as quantified through standardized test scores. By comparison, the advantages conferred to students in larger interventions ranged from one-third to one-half that magnitude.

University of Virginia Professor Beth Schueler, Kraft’s co-author, argued that those outcomes remained “pretty impressive,” if not the equal of what had been measured previously. 

“Even though the large-scale programs weren’t replicating the enormous effects that you find with small-scale trials, the size of the impact that we find for these more policy-relevant studies are still quite meaningful.”

Notably, the 265 studies included in Schueler and Kraft’s analysis are all built around randomized control trials, seen as the empirical gold standard in quantitative research. They were all conducted in the countries making up the , a group of wealthy, industrialized nations whose education systems are often compared against one another. 

Across the entire sample of studies, average effects from tutoring were roughly equivalent to those found in earlier research reviews. But improvements to test scores shrank substantially when the authors looked only at programs enrolling between 400 and 999 pupils; they grew smaller still when restricted to those enrolling more than 1,000. 

Robert Balfanz, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, observed that the early hype promoting tutoring as a “silver bullet” for COVID-related learning loss was destined to be deflated when school districts began leveraging them to reach thousands of struggling students. Still, he added, even high-enrollment efforts delivered important growth to children.

“This study just shows the reality that [tutoring] is a very effective intervention, but it’s going to take a lot of time and patience and learning to get it to work at scale,” said Balfanz, who has contributed to to recruit 250,000 tutors and mentors to work in schools. “Even then, scale is always going to diminish what you can do for a smaller group.”

An issue of scale

Emerging research on COVID-era tutoring initiatives has attested to the complexities facing state and district leadership. 

Kraft last month of Nashville’s program, which was established in 2021 and has grown to incorporate about 10 percent of the district’s total students. Over its first two years in operation, students’ reading performance has improved only modestly, with no corresponding gains in math. Another low-touch experiment, targeting middle schoolers in suburban Chicago, detected only a slight upturn in standardized test scores from a handful of tutoring sessions offered over Zoom.

But some advocates caution that it may be premature to measure the influence of tutoring systems that only got underway during a public health emergency. Buffeted by school closures and an uncertain budgetary picture, the initial transition to tutoring was rocky in many areas. Districts found it challenging to coordinate with families who had disengaged from schools, and an ultra-hot labor market made tutoring recruitment especially difficult.

Ashley Bencan is the chief operating officer of the , which launched as a pilot in the summer of 2021. Since then, the organization has grown to partner with 10 district and charter school partners in over 30 locations. But even buoyed by federal and state funding, Bencan said, local schools have struggled to build up tutoring systems on top of their typical organizational demands. 

Even collecting data on which students participate in tutoring — a vital step in determining whether the efforts actually work, Bencan said — can test the capacity of both school districts and state education agencies.

“If you’re juggling all the different things you have to work on to kick off the school year — reviewing data, grouping kids, filling positions — they have to meet those basic needs first, and only then think of what else they can do,” she said. “Tutoring isn’t designed to meet those basic needs, and we need to think about how we make it part of a school’s model.”

The logistical challenges of shoehorning tutoring into already-packed school schedules, finding sites where sessions can occur, and connecting families with tutors, can be considerable. Though Kraft and Schueler write that the design of successful tutoring programs can be effectively duplicated at a larger scale, they also find that implementation quality sometimes suffers in the course of expansion. Polls of district leaders that larger schools consistently saw lower participation rates from students, and only about one-sixth of principals in one survey reported that they had faced no barriers in providing tutoring.

Encouragingly, Kraft and Schueler’s analysis suggests that some program structures can withstand the pressures of scale. If the programs conducted in-person tutoring during school hours, featuring a student-tutor ratio of no more than 3:1, and met at least three times each week (along with other conditions), their effects were more robust with larger numbers of students. While the average impact for a program serving 100–399 pupils was 42 percent smaller than one serving less than 100, those employing the high-quality practices listed above saw their effects diminished by just 18 percent.

Schueler said the diminished, though still significant, effects of scaled-up tutoring may simply suggest that policymakers have underestimated both the scale of learning loss and the hurdles to manufacturing new learning assets from scratch.  

“We are finding suggestive evidence that those implementation challenges are real, and policymakers need to think about how to get that stuff right.”

In both cases, we collaborate with programs across the country that help bring additional people into schools — beyond traditional staffers — to meet the scale and intensity of students’ post-pandemic needs. 

AmeriCorps has been a critical asset to this work, providing committed and engaged citizens willing to serve their schools and communities in a time of enormous need. If Congress does not act, though, AmeriCorps’s participation could drop significantly — or even go away altogether. This would impact hundreds of thousands of students at a critical time.

AmeriCorps provides funding to nonprofit organizations and stipends to volunteers, allowing them to work full time in communities. Thousands of them assist schools with tutoring to help address learning recovery and develop relationships with students and their families to take on chronic absenteeism.

In Philadelphia, for example, recruits, trains and coaches a racially and generationally diverse cohort of AmeriCorps members who work full time delivering daily, 30-minute, in-person tutoring to pairs of students in grades K-3. Joyful Readers’ AmeriCorps tutors utilize a multi-sensory, structured language program that provides research-based materials and strategies that are essential to a comprehensive reading, spelling and handwriting program. They served approximately 1,120 students during the 2023-24 school year.

In Minnesota, Mississippi and New York, delivers high-dosage math tutoring to K-3 students using AmeriCorps members, providing early intervention. Math Corps AmeriCorps tutors also track students’ progress and regularly meet with coaches to assess data and work toward learning targets. To date, Math Corps has served 55,451 students across urban, rural and suburban schools, with the goal of using evidence-based math curriculum to set students on a STEM career trajectory.

implements the Minnesota Promise Fellows program, deploying AmeriCorps members as success coaches in schools and districts statewide to address chronic absenteeism. Promise Fellows serve on district attendance teams and assist school and district staff by collecting data; sharing information on health care, mental health, housing and other resources with students and families; and forging strong relationships with young people to support engagement, attendance and academic success.

AmeriCorps has been around since the 1990s, with support from both Democratic and Republican administrations and congressional leadership, and in that time has grown to recruit around 70,000 members each year. The House has now proposed gutting AmeriCorps. The Senate should reject that proposal and fund AmeriCorps at a level that ensures that service will continue uninterrupted. In fact, schools and communities — especially those that have been historically underserved — need more AmeriCorps members to act as tutors, mentors and student success coaches to meet this moment. 

Schools and communities are working hard to get kids back to where they should be. . Absenteeism is a massive challenge facing schools, and they want help in addressing it. Effective strategies exist, but schools need additional adults – with robust training and ongoing guidance from leadership — to help schools, families and students address various obstacles to regular school attendance. When schools have a majority of students behind grade level in reading and math, as is true in many high-poverty areas, they need to employ high-dosage tutoring. These initiatives require people — and AmeriCorps each year identifies precisely the kind of people the nation’s students need. 

This is a key moment to help schools and children across the country. There is broad bipartisan agreement about the urgency of addressing learning gaps and absenteeism, and there is enormous public support for initiatives like tutoring that reach the most vulnerable kids. Congress needs to ensure that AmeriCorps can deploy the tens of thousands of dedicated individuals willing to serve in schools and communities at this crucial moment.

AmeriCorps works in all 50 states — one of the rare programs that benefits both red and blue America. The cost of restoring AmeriCorps program levels and helping hundreds of thousands of kids is modest. But the cost of inaction is high. Unaddressed learning loss and absenteeism will lead to fewer students graduating prepared for adult success, resulting in social and economic costs to communities and the nation. We urge Congress to support AmeriCorps, its members working in schools across the country and the students they serve.

Such a classification is racist, sexist, classist, inaccurate and — worst of all, they say — lasting. Many Americans who absorbed such messages in their youth continue to define themselves this way decades later. 

And they those insecurities to their children, as if math competency is an innate trait and not a learned skill. This sort of old-school thinking has, for generations, sidelined students of all types, including girls, and those who come from impoverished communities, math equity advocates say. Pushed away from STEM at an early age, they learn to count themselves out of lucrative opportunities. 

“The highest point that they can reach is drastically diminished if they are put on these lower tracks,” said Marian Dingle, a veteran teacher and head of , a group that aims to boost mathematics education for all students, with a focus on Hispanics. 

Math experts are calling for a new mindset, saying teachers and parents should expect that some children might need extra time — or tutoring — to master mathematical concepts and that these accommodations do not reflect negatively on their overall ability or potential. 

“Research shows that when students are labeled based on perceived math aptitude, it risks negatively impacting the student’s self-efficacy and motivation, leading to long-term struggles with math and kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lasana Tunica-El, senior deputy director of campaigns for . “They’ve received and heard this labeling — and then they fulfill the labeling.”

Pamela Seda, president of the , which works to empower Black children by boosting their access and success in mathematics, said she would love to see a more progressive, flexible and inclusive mindset adopted in the nation’s classrooms. But, she said, American schools are quick to place students on one path or another, often influenced by the child’s race. Critical decisions are made early — and they stick.

“We use math as a means to sort kids by who gets to be at the top and who gets to be at the bottom,” she said. “Our systems have not changed.”

Seda, who spent 26 years teaching in public schools, isn’t sure why people’s notions around success in math have become so rigid. Children, she said, need individualized help. 

She recalled teaching her own kids — now adults — how to do their own laundry when they were young. Ranging in age from 5 to 9, she instructed each one on how to sort their clothes and operate the washing machine, she said. Her youngest needed a step stool to complete the task, but his mother was not deterred. 

“It never crossed my mind that he couldn’t do it,” Seda said of him. 

And that’s the same mentality educators must adopt when it comes to their students, she said. A math coordinator for three different school districts, she’s tried to create such learning environments and encouraged other teachers to do the same.

“The challenge is, they still work within schools and within systems that undermine that,” she said. “They are trying to do the best they can.” 

Math anxiety leads to another complexity, said Tunica-El. It impacts not only the general public but the . Many shy away from teaching mathematical concepts even in the early grades because they are unsure of their abilities. 

“And then some of that is superimposed onto students, unfortunately,” he said. 

Dingle, of TODOS: Math for All, noted that many math educators come into the field for different reasons: Some are fascinated with the subject matter while others are more interested in working with students. 

“So you’ve got all these different types of people thrown into the mix,” she said. “If we just start from a place of assets, I think it’s easier to lean into the normalization of the idea that learning is learning and it doesn’t matter the pace.”

Dingle said educators need to embrace the idea that certain skills are imperative to being human, including numeracy, mathematical skill and mathematical intuition. 

Josh Recio, systemic transformation lead at at UT Austin, said math is unusual in that the ultimate goal for many students is to take calculus in their senior year of high school — what might be considered as the ultimate signpost of whether they are ‘good at math.’ 

“But the only way to do that is to accelerate at some point because it takes five math classes to get to calculus — and there’s only four years of high school,” he said. 

Students who wish to reach this goal must take algebra in the eighth grade.

“So, you start seeing students placed into actual advanced courses starting in sixth grade, but that identification happens prior to that,” Recio said, sometimes as early as second or third grade. 

Some believe that the only way to eliminate tracking is to place all students on an accelerated path, but Recio disagrees. 

“I don’t think doing it for every student is right,” he said. “There are students who are ready to accelerate and there are those who are not. We need to continue to create opportunities to get them to that point.”

Alan Garfinkel, professor of integrative biology and physiology and medicine at UCLA, isn’t sure that’s a worthy objective. He questioned the value of added time and tutoring because the math we are teaching inside America’s classrooms, he argued, does not meet the moment.

“What does it mean to be good at math?” he asked. “The standard answer back then — and the standard answer right now — is that ‘good at math’ means the ability to rattle off formulas. It’s stupid pet tricks to solve absolutely trivial problems. That whole attitude is the enemy.”

More valuable, he said, would be for students to see — and solve — real-world problems by formulating them in mathematical terms and understanding how they evolved in a systematic way. He cited stopping the spread of COVID through modeling or finding out why people still turn away from electric vehicles, despite their benefits. 

“If you gave me a magic wand that I could use to make the entire population earn A’s in AP Calculus,” he said, “I wouldn’t take it.” 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The Charles A. Dana Center and ���˶���.

Like so many before me, I decided to go into education because of a teacher — in my case, Hillary Hollandsworth, my high school English teacher, who inspired me to wrestle with what sort of positive change I’d like to see in the world and empowered me to dream of what a better world could look like.

I was accepted to the Uncommon Schools Summer Teaching Fellowship program and assigned to teach six high school students world history during summer school in Newark. I always knew I wanted to teach at a school that educates students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, so I was eager to learn more about the curriculum, instruction and classroom management. After seven weeks in the program, I’m fortunate to say that I wasn’t let down.

I had tutored students before, but this was my first experience teaching in a classroom. I was overwhelmed during the first few days. My ice-breakers to get to know the students were a failure, and I was concerned they would think I was too dull and become disengaged. I tried to battle my fear by remembering the practical strategies for effective teaching I had learned in my training, such as how to prepare lessons and respond to students’ mistakes in the moment.

I asked my supervising teacher for guidance. She recommended allowing more time for students to talk with each other in pairs about complex questions that related to my lesson’s content. After making time for more peer-to-peer conversations, as well as having whole-class discussions, I found I was starting to reach the students. I experienced further success after putting in the time to build rapport with students through small acts, like greeting them in the hallway, as well as having lively discussions that gave them a chance to voice their own ideas around the academic content. These discussions were integral to improving student engagement, and it was at those times that I grew the most as a teacher. 

One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned is that for whole-class discussions to be productive, students must have a depth of knowledge related to the topic beforehand and have precise guidelines on how to communicate during the discussion. If these prerequisites are met, the insights that emerge from students are surprisingly thoughtful and makes one reassess what young people are capable of understanding.

When students can see the relevance of what they’re learning and connect it to issues they deeply care about, they become passionate and thoughtful. The greatest example I experienced was during a discussion about nonviolent resistance movements and Mahatma Gandhi’s tactics. During the discussion on peaceful resistance, students connected Gandhi’s approach to the current forms of civil resistance that African Americans engage in around police brutality. One student said, “I used to think that violence had to be used. Now I feel like there really is another way.” Another student, reflecting on why Gandhi’s organizing was effective, brought to the attention of the class that “Black people used to be part of a strong community, now Black people are more going solo.” This led to a conversation about the importance of building strong communities and the opportunity to create solidarity among members of different races struggling for justice.

What amazed me even more was that this insightful discussion occurred while I was doing the least amount of speaking, just throwing out a question or occasionally reiterating what students had said. The program had taught me how to enable students to have highly productive discussions, by ensuring they have enough background knowledge and facilitating these conversations to ensure no student is dominating or left out. I gradually grew in my confidence and comfort level in leading the classroom and adding my own flaIr to what I taught. 

I believe that teaching history is part of raising civically minded students. One example was our closing discussion on the Industrial Revolution. After lessons about the horrors of child labor and the abuse of women workers during that period, I asked my students during a discussion about what this history teaches in terms of developing and using technology for social good. To my astonishment, one announced to the class that the inequalities found in the Industrial Revolution occurred because of the lack of democratic input around developing and governing technology. One contemporary parallel they came up with is current issues around cellphones.

It was in moments like this that I felt most connected to my goals around civic education. Over time, as I became more experienced and received feedback from my instructional coach, I was able to help students recognize connections between the past and the present. I also grew in my ability to create a sense of community with my students and to respond to each student’s learning style. For example, some needed multiple verbal recaps of the information, while others needed extra time to read the documents we were studying.

After my training this summer, I am just as committed and proud of how much I have learned to become a better teacher. Now, I can say with pride, that I’m starting to follow in Ms. Hollandsworth’s footsteps.

If I hired a tutor for my daughter, I’d be covering up the school’s and the teachers’ negligence. If I allowed my daughter to fail, however, I would be forcing her school and her teachers to face the consequences of their malpractice.

When I wrote about my position, it enraged many readers, with :

It’s always great to use your children as sacrificial lambs to make a political point than to do your best for them!

This woman is nuts, you work to give your kids what they need to succeed — period. Nothing will change with the school system whether the kid succeeds or fails.

You want to teach the Board of Education a lesson by letting your daughter failed (sic) her Spanish Regents Exam? You need your head examined.

And to that effect.

Except, now that the academic year is over, I can report that my approach worked. And that the outcome benefited not just my daughter, but her classmates and future students of the school.

In math class, my daughter and a group of friends first went to their guidance counselor with complaints about their teacher, and then to the principal, who sat in on one of their classes and promptly brought in a new instructor. Now that they had a teacher who, as my daughter said, “actually makes sense when he talks,” she went from getting 48%, 23% and 14% on tests to a final grade of 94. (And it wasn’t just her grades, which can be subjective. After all the drama, my daughter received an 85 on her math Regents exam. She actually learned.)

For Spanish 3, after five weeks of having no teacher at all in a class that would be culminating with another Regents exam, my daughter and her classmates complained to the Advanced Placement Spanish teacher, who invited them to attend her office hours for intense tutoring.

“She gave us a list of [vocabulary] words to memorize,” my daughter reported. “In the last five weeks of school, she taught us five different conjugations we didn’t know we needed. She made us try. It was horrible.”

My daughter finished 11th grade with a final grade of 80 in Spanish. And, much to our mutual shock, with an 83 on the Regents.

First and foremost, I must thank those teachers who went out of their way to help, even when it, technically, wasn’t their responsibility. As I have written about the inadequacies of some teachers, I feel compelled to shout it from the rooftops with gratitude for the ones who go above and beyond on a daily basis.

Secondly, kudos to the students at my daughter’s school who took their education into their own hands and demanded better instruction than what they were getting. They are an inspiration to those of us who sometimes lose faith that schools ever will, or ever could, improve.

And, finally, a plea to my fellow parents and guardians: Yes, I know it’s hard to watch your kids struggle. Yes, I know we all want to do what’s best for our children, give them a leg up, “give your kids what they need to succeed — period,” as one of my critics insisted.

But that’s a short-term solution for a much larger, institutional problem.

No school, whether in NYC or elsewhere in the nation, will ever fix its failures unless it is forced to confront them. And no school will ever be forced to confront them if families, desperate to protect their children’s grade-point average, continue picking up the slack, making the school appear to be doing an adequate job when it is, in fact, outsourcing its instruction to parents and private tutors while taking credit for positive results.

My daughter and her friends demanded that their school properly educate them and chalked up a victory not only for themselves, not only for their peers, but for all American students who now have a blueprint for taking similar action: In order to succeed, you first have to demonstrate where you’ve failed.

When schools closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact was deep and long lasting. In Maryland schools, test scores fell to an all time low, particularly in math.

In 2021, counties received funds to provide high-dosage (intensive) tutoring to students to close gaps caused by school closures. This funding ensured that students consistently engaged in targeted, supplemental instruction at least two to three times per week for 30-45 minutes per session.

In fall 2021, the Reach Together Tutoring Program (RTTP), a partnership program of the George and Betsy Sherman Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County collaborated with Baltimore City Public Schools to provide high-dosage tutoring that helps students access and master rigorous, grade-level mathematical concepts.

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The partnership was not new. In fact, UMBC staff and students have long worked with educators to not only support professional development and community programming, but also to educate, develop, and place UMBC graduates in teaching positions in Baltimore through the Sherman Scholars Program. Our growing partnership with city schools, ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund) funding, and our access to college students, allowed us to scale our previous efforts.

The program supports students in second through eighth grade who are selected based on diagnostic assessment scores. RTTP participants scored in the bottom quartile, which equates to two or more grade levels below where they should be. Tutoring occurs during the school day utilizing the “personalized learning” block, in order to minimize disruption to the core curriculum.

What makes RTTP unique is the hiring of UMBC students as math coaches. Math coaches work with a small group of students two to three times a week during the academic year for approximately 24 weeks. Using an acceleration model, coaches focus on high-leverage foundational skills that align to grade-level content. They receive extensive preservice and ongoing training highlighting cultural competency, mathematical mindsets and student engagement.

Our mission is simple: “We will facilitate purposeful math experiences that enhance each student’s math identity and accelerate their learning trajectory.”

In 2021, we were in four Baltimore City Schools serving 355 students and had 85 UMBC math coaches. Fast forward to today and we just completed our third year of programming in nine Baltimore City schools (Arundel Elementary, Cherry Hill Elementary Middle School, Lakeland Elementary Middle School, Westport Academy, Park Heights Elementary, Dickey Hill Elementary Middle, Fallstaff Elementary Middle School, Bay Brook Elementary Middle and Curtis Bay Elementary) serving 644 students.

Since 2021, UMBC math coaches have completed 45,586 tutoring sessions. This spring we partnered with the city schools to increase capacity and serve more students through the with a focus on grades six-eight. We are looking forward to expanding to 10 schools in school year 2024-25.

Is it working? We partnered with faculty from UMBC’s Public Policy and Education departments to complete a two-year program evaluation. Results indicate that participants of RTTP made greater progress when looking at test score gains and percentile gains from beginning of year to end of year when compared to non participants. Student survey data indicates that 85% of students felt more confident in math after participation in RTTP, with one eighth grade student from Cherry Hill saying, “I could get help, and if I got it wrong, they didn’t put me down.”

But there’s more. RTTP has not only supported students in Baltimore City, but has created a lasting impact and shifted career trajectories for UMBC students. Math coaches are undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students from all majors, races, genders, and ethnicities.

We increased from 85 math coaches in school year 2021-22 to over 165 in school year 2023-24, when more that 1,100 UMBC students applied to be a math coach. Candidates from the Sherman Scholars Program participate in RTTP as part of their academic learning experience, giving them a hands-on opportunity to engage with students prior to beginning their teacher internship year.

Over the last three years, we have had several math coaches decide that they wanted to become teachers. They earned a master of arts in teaching and are now teaching in schools where they tutored.

Rehema Mwaisela is one such scholar who, after her first year as a math coach in her junior year at UMBC, said, “Before I was math coach in Baltimore City, I thought I wanted to be a mathematician, or just keep with math in grad school, but now I know my place in math is empowering Baltimore City scholars as much as I can with mathematical knowledge.”

She now teaches at Westport Academy. RTTP has created an exciting space where community engaged scholarship and partnership intersect and the impact is complex and far-reaching.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on and .

It was the third attempt in two years.

With the school year winding down, some districts never even got word the program existed. Those that participated quickly scrambled to cram it into their schedules.

“The timing wasn’t optimal,” said Matt Montaño, superintendent of the Bernalillo Public Schools, north of Albuquerque, and one of just five districts out of the state’s 89 to sign up. Staff members, he said, were “a little bit less than enthusiastic” about the interruption.

The late rollout was only the most recent snag in the state’s troubled effort to spend millions in federal relief funds for tutoring before the deadline to use the money hits next month.

The first attempt — with an on-demand, virtual provider — met with a meager response from families. A second try never got off the ground because of a contract mishap the state still won’t fully explain. And the delayed start on the third effort means only a fraction of the students slated for tutoring got it. State officials estimate that between 2,000 and 3,000 students received the extra help — far less than the 8,000 they were hoping to reach.

“Clearly, it was not the best,” Amanda DeBell, New Mexico’s deputy education secretary, said of the condensed program. But in July, the legislature pumped new life into the effort, providing $8.5 million for high-dosage tutoring this fall. The state also plans to use what’s left of the $4 million in federal relief funds that they’d hoped to spend last school year to support math tutoring for middle school students.

Data shows New Mexico students still have a lot of ground to make up to combat pandemic learning loss. The state in fourth grade math and reading in the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The experience underscores the difficulty of pulling off a statewide tutoring effort — even one backed by convincing research and millions of dollars in federal relief funds.

At a May tutoring conference at Stanford University, Education Secretary Arsenio Romero spoke candidly about the state’s false starts. 

“Sometimes we as educators are our own worst enemies,” he said. “We go through year-long cycles before we … make changes. You need to be able to pivot.” 

‘All the way to the living room’

Especially when the needs are so great. 

On state tests, less than a quarter of New Mexico students meet math standards and just 38% score proficient in English language arts. The state also continues to operate under to improve education for English learners and low-income, special education and Native American students.

In late 2022, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the state had signed a with Paper, a virtual, on-demand tutoring company. The promised to offer students in high-poverty elementary and middle schools — those hit hardest by school closures — up to 20 hours of free tutoring.

But the state abruptly terminated the contract less than three months later. The model expected families to sign up for help on nights and weekends, which research shows who are furthest behind. Those students might not know the right questions to ask a tutor, and technical glitches associated with online programs tend to frustrate both kids and parents who are already discouraged.

“This service is not providing the results in terms of engagement, support or delivery of service to the state’s students,” Mariana Padilla, then-interim secretary of education, wrote to the company.

Montaño in Bernalillo doesn’t think any students in his district signed up for the program. “Deployment from the state level all the way to the living room of families is a hugely difficult process,” he said.

Paper officials cited multiple reasons for the rocky rollout. The program launched just as students returned from holiday break in January 2023, and the state didn’t give the company enough time to get buy-in from families and schools, said spokeswoman Ava Paydar.

Re-envisioning tutoring 

Romero, appointed secretary by Lujan Grisham in March 2023, faced the immediate challenge of finding a more-effective tutoring provider.

“It really … allowed us to re-envision what we wanted tutoring to look like,” he said at the Stanford conference. 

Three months after it canceled Paper’s contract, the state education department for vendors who could offer a high-impact model, either in person or virtually. The virtual classes that predominated during the height of the pandemic set students back academically by months, even years. But research shows that live instruction from a tutor working remotely can produce positive results if schools schedule sessions during the school day and offer the same consistent and frequent support as an in-person tutor.

The state chose three providers, who were slated to begin serving students last August. But officials abruptly canceled that program before it got started because of a protest from another vendor that wasn’t chosen. The department declined to explain the nature of the dispute, and Romero said the education department never finalized contracts with the three providers.

Some education advocates grew impatient as they watched the school year go by without a program in place. 

“We failed to offer consistent access to quality, high-impact tutoring,” said Amanda Aragon, executive director of NewMexicoKidsCAN, part of a national network of education policy and advocacy groups. She called the spring effort “in no way sufficient.”

While New Mexico may have faced more obstacles than most, other states trying to provide tutoring to thousands of students have weathered similar ordeals.

New Jersey to get funding to districts to hire tutors, and Virginia initially got a from districts when Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced his new All in VA plan, which includes high-impact tutoring in third through eighth grades. In Louisiana, some vendors passed on participating in a program that pays for one-to-one sessions — about half what providers normally charge. 

“Any state that was ambitious enough to take on large-scale implementation of tutoring has experienced growing pains,” said Nakia Towns, chief operating officer of Accelerate, a funding tutoring programs and research. Many have struggled to find high-quality vendors and convince districts to participate. 

With the new state funding, New Mexico is trying something different. The state will provide the money, but districts will issue their own contracts and have flexibility to hire teachers or choose the outside vendors they want. 

District efforts

One reason New Mexico leaders ultimately changed course is that they saw that districts had succeeded in blending tutoring into the school day.

Ten Las Cruces schools participated in a program this past school year with , a virtual model led by credentialed educators. Students who were a grade level or more behind gained roughly twice as much learning as those who didn’t get tutoring, leading the district to invite the provider back this fall, said co-founder Rahul Kalita.

Romero visited one of the district’s schools in October and saw Spanish-speaking students practicing their English skills with a bilingual tutor while also getting math support.

Kalita attributed some of the state’s prior difficulties to a lack of “steady leadership” at the top. Romero is New Mexico’s third education secretary since 2019.

“Funding is critical, but it’s just the first step,” he said.

Further evidence on in-school tutoring comes from on a virtual model that has helped prepare over 500 New Mexico middle school students for high school algebra. The program, continuing this fall, is used in large districts like Chicago, Miami-Dade and Fulton County, Georgia. In New Mexico, the effort includes 19 districts, many of them small and isolated, like Tatum Municipal Schools. 

Located about 15 miles from the Texas border, the rural district had just 26 seventh graders last school year. All of them received tutoring, and over half met or exceeded goals by the spring. That’s a small improvement over their scores from sixth grade, said Superintendent Robin Fulce, but he considers that progress significant because of the “big jump” in rigorous material in seventh grade.

The program has convinced Fulce that students can form tight relationships even with tutors they meet online. 

Recently, two of those tutors passed through town for a visit.

“They brought doughnuts and every kid in that seventh grade went over and hugged them. “It was a very good experience,” Fulce said. To him, the state’s multiple tutoring efforts reinforced that offering services outside the school day doesn’t benefit “kids who need it the most.”

The results, Romero said, influenced the state’s decision to shift gears and make “decisions based on research and data.”

Montaño, the Bernalillo superintendent, estimated that about 800 students in his district received services — roughly half those he felt should have gotten the support. But he doesn’t consider it a wasted effort.

“It was too good of an opportunity for us not to take advantage” of it, he said. 

The United States has a math crisis—and it’s not just the students. It extends to those choosing how to spend federal pandemic relief dollars. Even when they choose the best prescriptions to make up for the pandemic’s learning losses, they are using the wrong dosage. It’s a multiplication problem.

The average student in the U.S. lost the equivalent of half a year of math instruction and a quarter of a year in reading. Many urban school districts that were closed for much of 2020-21, such as St. Louis and New Haven, lost one and a half years, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s start with the national average of half a year.

Let’s complete a math exercise together, focusing on four interventions proven to help students catch up: high-dosage tutoring, an extra period of math instruction, six weeks of summer school, and an extended school year. Pre-pandemic research suggests that the first three types of interventions generate the equivalent of one year, half a year, and a quarter of the typical year’s growth in math, respectively. Let’s assume that students receive the same amount of instruction in each additional week of school as they do during the school year. As illustrated by the chart, if 10% of students in any given district received “high-impact” tutoring, 30% received double periods of math, 75% attended summer school, and 100% went to school for two and a half weeks longer, they would recover half a year of learning.

Challenging? Yes. But doable.

Inadequate responses

Unfortunately, I know of no district coming close to this level of intervention. Nationally, only 2% of students are receiving high-impact tutoring, where they are receiving about three hours a week of tutoring for 36 weeks, or about 108 hours total. Most districts are providing only 15-20 hours and only for a small percentage of students, nowhere near the 10% in my catch-up assumption.

Summer school attendance has been 15% or 20% in many urban districts, light years behind my assumed 75%.

I don’t have national data on the percentage of students receiving double doses of math, but I’m confident it is nowhere near 30%.

Further, very few school districts have extended their school year. The struggle in Richmond, Virginia illustrates the challenge. According to the Education Recovery Scorecard, students in third through eighth grade lost the equivalent of one and a half years of math and reading achievement between 2019 and 2022, more than any other district in Virginia. Starting in the spring of 2021, while schools were still closed, Superintendent Jason Kamras proposed a year-round calendar to help students catch up. Students would have one month off in the summer and four two-week breaks during the school year. Most students would still have 180 school days a year, but the district would select 5,000 students to receive up to 40 days of extra instruction during the breaks. His school board turned him down. Instead, they allowed him to pilot a longer school year in just two of the city’s 54 schools. The two schools started this summer, and student attendance has been strong.

Leadership counts

As illustrated in Richmond, part of the challenge has been the absence of political leadership. To undertake the major reforms that would be required to help students catch up, school district leaders need political air cover.

As a U.S. senator, Lamar Alexander helped push through the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2015, which defined the federal role in K-12 education, returning significant power to the states. But states have largely declined the opportunity to lead, and the education reform effort in the U.S. has been rudderless. We’re a long way from the era when governors such as Bill Clinton (Arkansas), Jim Hunt (North Carolina), brothers George W. Bush (Texas) and Jeb Bush (Florida), as well as Alexander himself (who then led Tennessee) used a combination of the bully pulpit, funding, and policies to push an unprecedented wave of state-led reforms in the 1980s and 1990s.

Only recently have leaders such as Governor Jared Polis in Colorado and Governor Glenn Youngkin in Virginia begun to make improving students’ outcomes a centerpiece of their agendas, and not just a stage for culture wars.

There are some modest bright spots. Under Commissioner of Education Mike Morath’s leadership, Texas required districts to provide an additional 30 hours a week of small-group instruction to students in the lowest achievement category. It’s unlikely to be enough for many students, but it’s a lot more than what other states are providing.

Many states, such as Tennessee and Colorado, have launched tutoring initiatives—again, a laudable move—but none of these programs have the dosage levels that will produce a meaningful impact.

The federal government provided billions of additional dollars of pandemic-related support. When the American Rescue Plan passed in March of 2021, no one knew how large the achievement losses would be. And, wanting to preserve district flexibility, Congress only required districts to spend 20% of the money on academic catch-up (with a loose definition of what could count). The result was predictable. Much of the funding has gone to salary increases, HVAC systems, or additional school counselors. In the worst cases, states have allowed communities to use the federal funds to replace local tax revenues—a shell game that will help exactly zero children. In the end, only a small share of federal aid has been used to replace what students lost during the pandemic: instructional time.

Looking ahead

With a legal deadline to commit the funds by September 2024, school districts have one more year to spend their federal relief dollars. Given that budgets have been set and the 2023-24 school year is about to begin, it will be difficult for districts to scale up their plans for the coming school year. However, there is still time for districts to plan a major scale-up of summer learning for the summer of 2024. There’s even some hope of continuing the effort beyond next summer. Although the American Rescue Plan law requires districts to commit the funds by next September, the federal Department of Education has the authority to allow districts to spend down those funds over the following year (the legal term is “liquidate”), as long as the contracts are signed and the funds are obligated by the deadline. The Biden administration should prioritize extending the spending deadline for programs that increase students’ instructional time—tutoring programs, summer learning, after-school programs, school vacation academies, and salary increases associated with an extended school year.

Although there’s still hope that districts will help younger students catch up, we cannot forget that four high school graduating classes—roughly 12 million students—have already started their postsecondary careers. The data suggest it’s been a rough start. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, community college enrollment declined by a staggering 20% between spring 2019 and spring 2023. The number of students seeking bachelor’s degrees at public and private colleges declined by 6%.

We know remarkably little about what has driven the declines in postsecondary enrollment. Many have speculated that the hot labor market was to blame. However, there’s little concrete evidence to confirm this. It is also possible that the decline was connected to the learning losses in K-12. For instance, especially in areas that spent much of the 2020-21 school year in remote instruction, the high school graduating classes of 2020 and 2021 would have had a hard time meeting with their college counselors to explore their postsecondary options and get help with financial aid.

Moreover, students who fell behind in math or reading in eighth through 10th grades may not have had time to complete the advanced high school coursework expected of many science and engineering majors. According to the College Board, the number of students taking Advanced Placement exams in biology and calculus (both AB and BC) fell by 9% and 12%, respectively, while the number of students taking the chemistry exam declined by 21%. Even if college enrollment rates recover, such trends do not bode well for what may happen to the number of college students pursuing STEM degrees in the coming years.

State leadership need

To resolve this question, we need more research on the relationship between achievement losses, school closures, and changes in postsecondary enrollment by high school. The answer is of more than academic interest as the pace of recovery in the postsecondary sector may well depend on recovery in elementary and secondary schools.

Because many students will not have caught up by the time the federal relief dollars are spent, we must begin discussing additional policies to continue the recovery following September 2024. Anything requiring a school board vote or state legislative action will take time to enact.

For one, states and cities should set aside resources for reaching out to recent high school graduates who never enrolled in college and offer assistance in exploring postsecondary options and applying for federal financial aid. It would be foolish to allow them to fall through the cracks, as the nation’s future workforce needs will depend on their continued training and development.

In addition, states should ensure that future graduating classes have what they need before leaving high school. For instance, students who do not achieve proficiency on state tests at the end of eighth grade should receive additional help during ninth grade to ensure that they are on track for college and a career. States might consider offering students the option of a fifth year in high school or free tuition for their first year in community college, giving them a chance to fill in gaps in coursework they missed in high school as a result of pandemic achievement losses.

The academic recovery effort following the pandemic has been undersized from the beginning. Although the research community and federal and state regulators encouraged districts to focus on “evidence-based” solutions such as high-dosage tutoring and summer learning, districts were never given clear guidance on the dosages required or the share of students they should be serving. Moreover, the guidance that was provided—specifically, the 20% minimum spending on “academic recovery”—was downright misleading.

The future consequence for students—and for the nation’s economy—if students fail to catch up will be dire. A conservative estimate of the loss in future earnings for those enrolled in public K-12 education during the 2020-21 school year is $900 billion. As the federal relief dollars are spent down, state and local leaders must step up. Today, there are two or three candidates seeking the mantle of “education governor.” We need 50 of them.

July, 2024 Update: I wrote this essay late last summer, while the evidence was at its bleakest: districts were struggling to implement recovery efforts and researchers were reporting disappointing results for specific recovery efforts. Subsequently, the prospects of recovery brightened somewhat. In January 2024, our Harvard/Stanford team of researchers . In June 2024, we . We found that the federal relief did have an impact on the recovery. Even though the impact per dollar spent was much smaller than if the funding had been spent solely on tutoring or learning, the estimated impact was nevertheless in line with pre-pandemic research on the effect of general revenue increases. The projected earnings impact from the improvement was sufficient to justify the expenditure.

ESSER relief was like the first stage of a rocket: powerful, but unfocused and likely insufficient to get us all the way back to 2019 levels of achievement. After the 2024 NAEP is released in January 2025, we expect to update the Education Recovery Scorecard with district recovery through 2024. Soon after, we expect to write a second report on the impact of ESSER spending during 2023-24. We hope we are wrong, but our results thus far imply that many districts will remain behind 2019 levels when the federal money runs out. 

It is alarming, then, that so many states have not even begun to discuss what they will do to continue the recovery after September 2024. Rather than provide additional general revenue as with ESSER, we hope states consider targeting aid at specific evidence-based solutions, such as tutoring or summer learning, especially in the districts which will remain behind. Otherwise, we will be forcing children to pay the price for the pandemic.

See more from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and its .

As a student, JUMP math curriculum creator John Mighton remembers struggling with the subject and then quickly beginning to panic as he fell behind. The fast pace of the curriculum he was taught prevented him from catching up and then his anxieties about being too slow got the best of him. 

“I would always compare myself to the kids who seemed to get things immediately,” Mighton said. “I gave up all the time. I really thought you have to be born with a gift for math to do well and I clearly don’t have it.”

Mighton said that too often, when students “decide they’re not in the talented group, their brains stop working.”

“It becomes a vicious cycle,” he said. “It becomes harder and harder for you to learn math.”

For this reason and others, Mighton built plenty of repetition and review — and an intentionally slower pace — into JUMP math when he designed the curriculum 20 years ago in Canada. It is now used by 10% of all Canadian students as a classroom resource and by about 2 million students globally, including in the United States, Spain, Chile, Bulgaria and Colombia. 

Within the U.S., JUMP provides resources to about 20,000 students annually across Louisiana, California, New York, Washington, Maryland and Michigan. In both 2022 and 2023, the program received grants from Accelerate, a national nonprofit that has given more than $30 million to various groups to scale tutoring efforts post-pandemic. Mighton is using the $400,000 in Accelerate funds to study the impact of JUMP’s curriculum as a tutoring resource in Louisiana and Michigan.

Robin Collinsworth, an instructional coach for math and science at Choudrant Elementary School in Choudrant, Louisiana, which uses JUMP math as both its primary classroom curriculum and as a tutoring resource, said it’s “different from most curriculums” because of its focus on scaffolding.

Collinsworth said that with JUMP lessons, instructors “unravel the content one strand at a time.” 

“By the end of the lesson you weave it all back together in a logical way that makes sense to kids,” Collinsworth said.

Kristanne Grange, a third-grade teacher at R.H. McGregor P.S. in Toronto where the whole school is piloting JUMP’s math curriculum, said that with some previous math resources she’s used that were more based on open inquiry, students approached problems “without any fundamental skills” and were lost. In contrast, Grange said JUMP is “almost back to the rote ways that I used to learn where there was a fact-based repetitive style to the curriculum.”

“This program is very much based on more individual practice, more building on skills as they come,” Grange said. “It’s very much like Legos clicking together. And so the children develop a lot of confidence and have a really good foundation to lean on when they start focusing on a problem.”

Brent Davis is a professor of math education at the University of Calgary who has been collaborating with JUMP and Mighton for years. Davis said there are “typically” between 10 and 20 things a student needs to notice in order to understand a mathematical concept.

“In order to learn mathematics well, to make sense of any given concept, you have to notice a whole bunch of little things around each concept,” Davis said.

Davis said Mighton and the JUMP math team are “especially talented at identifying everything that somebody needs to notice in order to understand the concept” and that all of those things are “already built into” the JUMP math curriculum.

“I know of no other resource that does that,” Davis said. “It is incredibly well engineered.”

Mighton said the number one thing that stands out about JUMP Math is that “we have evidence.”

A study of over 1,000 elementary school students in Canada who were taught with JUMP math found those students made “significantly more progress in math learning in the second year, especially in problem-solving.” 

“JUMP math may be a valuable evidence-based addition to the teacher’s toolbox,” the study states.

, which serves low-income students on New York City’s Lower East Side, saw the biggest improvement in math scores in the city in 2014 — the same year it adopted the JUMP math curriculum, according to JUMP math. Manhattan Charter School did not respond to a request for comment. 

implemented JUMP math between 2017 and 2019. Two of those schools “achieved striking gains” on state tests, according to JUMP math. In one school, the number of students scoring proficient in math increased by 23 percentage points. The NYC Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.

JUMP math’s initial grant from Accelerate, for $250,000, was used to implement “digital interactive lessons that students can use for independent, self-paced learning,” in Louisiana, Mighton said. The lessons were tested last spring with about 1,000 students. Students were given half-hour intervention periods during the school day to complete the digital lessons. 

Mighton said that the digital lessons were created by recording “master teachers” teaching from JUMP math lesson plans and then splitting the lessons into short, two-minute clips. Then, Mighton said, JUMP inserted “digital interactive questions” between the clips to assess whether students understood the material.

“The study’s goal was to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and support systems required to successfully implement a scalable tutoring model to address learning loss among students,” a JUMP math press release said. “The report shows improved overall math proficiency among participating students, whose learning progressed rapidly while using the JUMP math lesson modules over a two-month period, with a statistically significant improvement in scores across all modules.”

Tilman Sheets, a psychology and behavioral sciences professor at Louisiana Tech University, said in the release “the report findings suggest that the implementation of dedicated tutoring support and resources might contribute to reducing disparities in math skills among our most vulnerable students and may help to cultivate an interest in this critical subject.”

Collinsworth, the Choudrant Elementary School instructional coach, said that her school participated in the initial Accelerate study with digital sessions. Collinsworth said a fourth-grade class and two fifth-grade classrooms took part and all three saw gains. Collinsworth said a sixth-grade class also did the digital lessons, but said “there was a glitch in the module” so that class did not show growth.

The second Accelerate grant, for $150,000, is being used by JUMP to study both in-person and online live tutoring with JUMP resources. The study includes about 300 students in grades three through eight in both Louisiana and Michigan. In Louisiana, tutors are Louisiana Tech University students who come into schools for in-person tutoring, according to Mighton. In Michigan, tutors are mostly volunteers, he said, and some do their sessions with students online, while others tutor in-person.

Collinsworth said Choudrant Elementary is also participating in this second pilot.

“Everything is going really well and I expect to have positive results,” she said.

Dana Talley, the chief academic officer for Lincoln Parish School District in Louisiana, which includes Choudrant Elementary, said teachers who execute JUMP math lessons “the way it’s intended just really get good results.”

Talley said it is exciting to see JUMP math branch out into tutoring.

“The way JUMP is set up, the teacher in the classroom is a personal tutor for kids,” Talley said. “That’s how it’s designed. So I feel like it makes a ton of sense. They definitely have the right curriculum to move into the tutoring realm.”

Mighton said he expects tutoring to take on an even greater role in JUMP’s evolution.

“There is such a need,” he said.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and ���˶���.

• Title 1: Of all the federal Education Department’s funding streams, Title 1 is the best-known, the largest and the most appropriate for tutoring (although the others are also useful places to look). It was designed to target extra resources to high-need schools, specifically for math and reading. The good news is that a tutor is not needed for every student for every subject, so only a portion of Title 1 dollars is necessary. Tutoring is most important for students struggling with their coursework, including those who are not on track for proficiency in reading by the end of third grade or for by the end of ninth. Students who meet these benchmarks are four times more likely to graduate from high school as those who don’t. Districts should look hard at how they are spending Title 1 dollars to help students reach these two goals, redirecting staff positions or funds to tutoring programs with demonstrable return on investment.
  
• Multi-Tiered Systems of Support: Districts across the nation use Multi-Tiered Systems of Support to target appropriate interventions for students with learning, social, emotional, or behavioral difficulties. Many districts could improve these offerings by using a high-impact tutoring approach, making sure their interventions build relationships between students and educators that motivate, engage and target students’ growth areas using data and high-quality instructional materials. Schools can integrate high-impact tutoring with the funds already being used for MTSS by reallocating resources to more effective approaches.
  
• AmeriCorps: One of the priorities of this 30-year-old program is to support effective tutoring for high-need students. awards tens of millions of dollars in grant funding for tutoring and mentorship in early learning and K-12 schools. Districts can apply directly for federal funds through their State AmeriCorps commissions. These three-year grants can largely cover the costs of tutors and supervisory staff. Districts can also seek vendors that are AmeriCorps partners to provide tutoring, which brings a subsidy from the vendor directly into the district.

•  Work-study: This 60-year-old program enables lower-income students to work their way through college. Of the 20 million undergraduates in the U.S., about 600,000 receive work-study as part of their financial aid packages. This allows colleges to use federal funds to subsidize work by their students. Recent guidance has called on colleges and universities to spend at least 15% of those funds on community-based jobs, and tutoring is among the roles prioritized. With a district as a community partner, a college can .
  
• U.S. Department of Education teacher preparation funds: The 60-year-old is designed to increase the number of well-prepared teachers from diverse backgrounds. The focus is on the various aspects of the teacher preparation pipeline, including the recruitment, support and placement in underresourced schools with underserved students. This fund goes directly to higher ed; districts should partner with local colleges to design a tutor-to-teacher pathway.
  
• U.S. Department of Labor apprenticeship funds: These can support for future teachers. State departments of education can help districts address teacher shortages by strengthening the pathway to the classroom through the real-world experience of tutoring in schools. , for example, has just become a federal apprenticeship provider.

Since school districts often lack the capacity to seek grants or manage compliance requirements, leaders could ask local philanthropies for help. They could also rethink some of their current procedures to save money in the short and long term.

For example, some contracts pay providers based on student hours, not tutor hours. In other words, instead of paying a vendor $25 an hour for a tutor’s time (and overhead), some districts paid $75 for an hour in which that tutor worked with three students. Districts should renegotiate those contracts to pay for tutor time, regardless of how many students were assigned. They should also monitor tutoring implementation and effectiveness in order to make adjustments, maximizing impact; outcomes-based contracts with vendors can help.

And, they can reevaluate the timing of their tutoring programs. 

Offering high-quality tutoring during the school day makes it easier to connect to the kids and teachers, as they’re already in the building, than providing services outside of regular class time; helps cultivate a pipeline of talent entering the education system; and may help stem and reduce dropout rates.

Investing in third-grade literacy and Algebra 1 tutoring specifically makes sound long-term financial sense. Holding onto more kids is not only the right thing to do morally and educationally, but it provides a financial benefit. Allocating $500 to $1,000 per student for high-impact tutoring in grade 9 can yield an average of $15,000 in annual state per-pupil funding for each student who remains in high school for the next three years, until graduation. It is essentially an insurance policy that potentially preserves up to $45,000 in future funding per student, which can sustain tutoring initiatives and support other school needs. 

It is clear that districts have options for sustaining high-impact tutoring programs. Some may require challenging choices and changes, while others will require schools to form partnerships, which takes time and coordination. But if schools are to help students recover from the effects of COVID-related learning interruptions, they will need to focus on the strategies that can provide the strongest outcomes. Schools that make high-impact tutoring a funding priority now will enable their students to succeed for years to come.

As North Carolina celebrates the for K-3 teachers and literacy gains for young students, nearly half of of early-grade students are still below grade-level benchmarks.

Part of the solution, told the State Board of Education last week, is high-dosage tutoring, an evidence-based intervention for learning loss. Ed Corps was launched in 2020 at the start of the pandemic and during remote learning and is aligned with state-level standards for literacy.

“You’ve heard the phrase that it takes a village — we are working to equip the village beyond educators, specifically as high-impact tutors,” NC Ed Corps Executive Director John-Paul Smith told the Board. “For students who are starting behind coming into school, what they need is not only strong core instruction, but they also need some additional intervention, supplemental support. So that’s what the high-impact tutors are helping to provide.”

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Since 2021-22, Ed Corps has placed and supported nearly 1,300 corps members who have tutored more than 22,000 K-5 graders across 32 counties. This was supported through a mix of Covid-relief and private funds.

Ed Corps is important, Smith said, because it is difficult for districts to implement high-dosage tutoring at scale alone. Finding high-impact tutors, training coaching paraprofessionals, tracking sessions, and identifying funds to pay for the tutoring all present a challenge.

“With your support, NC Education Corps is addressing these challenges, in alignment with high-impact tutoring best practices and the MTSS framework,” Smith’s presentation to the Board said.

Ed Corps started as an initiative of the Board, along with the Office of the Governor, in September 2020. Today, it operates as a 501(c)(3).

Here’s a look at some of the main components of Ed Corps’ model.

• Frequency: Tutors meet with students for at least three sessions each week, 30 minutes per session.
• Measurement: Schools use data to tailor instruction and ensure consistency.
• Small groups: Tutors work with 1-4 students to provide structured, targeted instruction and relationship-based support.
• Curriculum: Tutors use curriculum to reinforce foundational skills.
• Trained personnel: Tutors gain knowledge and skills needed to improve student outcomes, and receive professional development and coaching support.

Dr. Paula Wilkins, chief academic officer at , spoke about the impact of the program in the district. During the 2023-24 school year, 432 students from 10 schools were served by 23 tutors in literacy skills.

“This is only one piece in a bigger, larger puzzle for our district, but we need more,” Wilkins said. “We need more help, and we need more funding to help… This work takes funding and support and intention.”

In addition to the , Smith said the expansion of private school vouchers and the upcoming election also increase financial uncertainty for districts.

In light of the reality that many districts will have less money to fund high-dosage tutoring, Smith said Ed Corps will be working to secure more funding from the state.

According to Smith’s presentation, the program costs roughly $1,200 per student to implement. Schools pay about $650 per student, primarily to pay for the tutoring wages. Ed Corps pays about $550 per student, which covers recruitment, training, coaching, and evaluation.

“We need your help in communicating that high-impact tutoring is not just ‘a nice to have.’ It’s really ‘a need to have’ if we truly do want all students to have the support that they need, starting early on, to succeed,” Smith said. “We need to continue to communicate that it’s going to take a while to see gains. Students are starting pretty far behind, and the gains that they’re making take a little while to show up on the academic assessment — we need to be patient.”

More on high-dosage tutoring model

According to Ed Corps’ website, high-impact tutoring “has been proven to provide significant learning gains for students in need.”

Ed Corps tutors work in Title I and/or low-performing schools, with students scoring below grade-level in reading and/or math. Based on served by tutors in 2022-23, 70.3% of students were identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged,
38.9% Black, 30.6% white, 20.8% Hispanic, 7.7% mixed race, and 0.3% American Indian.

“Tutors are working with high-need students in high-need schools to help them establish foundational literacy and math skills that are so critical to student success in school and future careers,” .

Literacy tutors are recruited, trained, and coached by Ed Corps. The tutors then work as part-time employees at partnering school districts, who pay for tutor time. Most tutors work 15 hours per week, but tutors can work up to 30 hours a week.

Tutors work with students during the school day — either joining them in the classroom or pulling them out of class for a session, depending on the school’s preference.

The vast majority of tutors are retired educators, Smith said, along with parents, community college students, and other retirees.

“High-dosage tutors are not simply providing homework help or reading aloud to students on an irregular basis,” the . “They provide personalized instructional support to students as extensions of school instructional teams in alignment with multi-tiered systems of student support and as a supplement to core instruction.”

During the 2023-24 school year, Ed Corps launched K-5 math tutoring in Ashe, Chatham, Orange, and New Hanover counties.

Moving forward, Smith said they want to expand high-dosage tutoring to more schools, including math tutoring, based on school demand and funding availability.

Next school year, Ed Corps will partner with , a national organization that supports various tutoring models that improve student outcomes. Accelerate is also “supporting promising tutoring initiatives in Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana, and Ohio,” according

They are also working to strengthen data collection and accountability measures, Smith said, “to assess more precisely tutor impact on skills tutored.”

N.C. State University’s Friday Institute and the Duke Social Science Research Institute started conducting a three-year mixed-methods evaluation of Ed Corps in spring 2021. You can read more about that evaluation on page 11 of the organization’s

Finally, the team is also working to deepen and diversify its funding. Ed Corps is asking North Carolina lawmakers to convert non-recurring state funding to recurring funds in order to secure the continuation of tutoring sessions into the 2025-26 school year.

“We appreciate the state’s support for our partnership with NC Education Corps and need it to fund in-person high-impact tutoring on a recurring basis to close opportunity gaps and set up all students for success in school and life,” New Hanover County Schools Superintendent Dr. Charles Foust said, as quoted in Ed Corps’ presentation.

To learn more about partnering or tutoring with NC Education Corps, you can visit

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Louisiana lawmakers advanced a bill Wednesday that would expand a voucher program for students not meeting state math and reading standards, and state officials are hoping demand for them will increase.

, authored by Rep. Jason Hughes, D-New Orleans, would increase the amount of voucher money families receive, expand the grades from which students can access the program and add numeracy tutoring to the program. The bill unanimously passed out of the Senate Education Committee.

The vouchers are currently worth $1,000. Hughes’ bill would increase the amount to $1,500.

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the expanded program will cost the state nearly $4.5 million starting in 2025. The program has previously been paid for with federal Elementary and Secondary School Relief (ESSR) funds.

The last round of ESSR funds expire in September, so the state must use the money by then or lose any remaining amount.

The Louisiana Department of Education originally invested $40 million of ESSR funds in the tutoring program, but the money was steered toward other needs once it became clear students would use only around $2 million.

Under the Hughes bill, students in kindergarten through 12th grade could use vouchers for either math or literacy tutoring. Currently, the vouchers are only available to kindergarten to fifth-grade students.

In order to be eligible, students must score below their grade level or fall short of mastery in math or English on state assessment tests and be considered at risk for learning difficulties. Priority is given to low-income families.

The vouchers can only be used for tutoring services the Louisiana Department of Education has approved. The state does not anticipate Hughes’ proposal to increase the percentage of students who will use the program. It’s estimated more than 300,000 students will be eligible but fewer than 3,000 students are expected to obtain tutoring.

According to a report, education advocates say the program is not well-known among teachers or parents. The availability of tutors has been sparse, and critics say unnecessary burdens such as the application process make it difficult to take part. As a result, only 0.8% of eligible students have been reached since the services were first offered in 2021.

Hughes’ bill would also change the name of the program to the Steve Carter Education Program. The former state representative, who died in 2021, chaired the House Education Committee from 2011 to 2025.

The proposal now moves to the Senate Finance Committee.

Also on Wednesday, the Senate Education Committee passed a bill that would create a screening for numeracy, or math basics, in kindergarten through third grade.

, authored by Rep. Kim Carver, R-Mandeville, mimics the system already in place for literacy screenings. It would require students to be tested three times a year and for parents to be notified if their children do not meet grade-level expectations.

Carver’s bill would also require numeracy intervention and support for students testing below grade level. They would also be given an improvement plan created in concert with their parents, teachers and other necessary school personnel.

The legislation carries a $2.5 million cost for the first year and $3 million every year after. The expense is associated with assigning new vendors to performing the screenings three times a year.

The proposal passed committee unanimously and now moves to the Senate Finance Committee. The legislation would be implemented in the 2026-27 school year if approved.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on and .

A U.S.-based tutoring company on Tuesday pushed back against a conservative campaign to “destroy” it due to security fears over its Chinese owner.

In a posted online, said the parents’ rights group in recent months has misrepresented its operations, falsely claiming it has ties to the Chinese government. The company, based in New York, said the parents’ group is trying to persuade lawmakers and others that Tutor.com “is somehow a puppet of the Chinese government and a threat to national security,” according to the letter. 

Founded two decades ago, Tutor.com was acquired in 2022 by , a Beijing-based investment firm in Hong Kong, Singapore and Palo Alto, Calif. In the letter to attorneys representing Parents Defending Education, the company said the parents’ group has chosen to portray Tutor.com “as a stalking horse to advance the advocacy group’s broader political agenda.”

The effort by Parents Defending Education both echoes and influences a larger one by lawmakers nationwide to raise security concerns about companies linked to China, including fears that they could be compelled to share student data with the Chinese government.

But John Calvello, Tutor.com’s spokesperson and chief institutional officer, said the fears are misplaced.

“First and foremost, it’s important to say: We are an American company,” he said in an interview. “I want to be very clear about that. And again, as an American company, you have to abide by all U.S laws and regulations.”

Tutor.com, Calvello said, “cannot be compelled to share data” with anyone.

He noted that it had recently undergone a voluntary review by the federal , which found, in his words, “no unresolved national security concerns.”

He also said the company has a designated security officer approved by the U.S. government to ensure data security compliance. And he said all of Tutor.com’s data is housed in the United States. 

According to the watchdog site , states, school districts, colleges and even the Pentagon have spent more than $35 million on contracts with Tutor.com over the past decade. Among the largest: nearly $1.6 million in 2015 for online homework tutoring for the U.S. Defense Department and $1.1 million in 2022 for tutoring at California State East Bay.

Following the pandemic, state and school district spending on Tutor.com, as with other tutoring providers, skyrocketed. In December, the New Hampshire Department of Education said it would through Tutor.com to every student in fourth- through twelfth grades, as well as to those prepping for GED exams. 

But many lawmakers have also sought to minimize China’s influence in both K-12 and higher education.

After Congress in 2018 targeted the nearly 100 Confucius Institutes on U.S. college campuses, restricting federal funding at schools with programs, their number dropped to fewer than five, according to a 2023 U.S. Government Accountability Office . 

In 2024, lawmakers are seeking to ban TikTok due to the social media application’s Chinese ownership. Primavera is a minority investor in ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. ByteDance also owns the AI-powered homework helper .

But Tutor.com has been the subject of much of the scrutiny around student data. In February, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, Lloyd Austin, saying the Pentagon’s relationship with Tutor.com is “ill-advised, reckless, and a danger to U.S. national security.”

Cotton said the Pentagon should end its dealings with the company, suggesting that students’ personal data, such as location, IP addresses and the contents of tutoring sessions, could be released to the Chinese government. He said the U.S. is “paying to expose our military and their children’s private information to the Chinese Communist Party.”

In March, Manny Diaz, Jr., Florida’s commissioner of education, to public K-12 and higher education leaders statewide, saying Tutor.com’s ties to “foreign countries of concern” may compromise student data privacy. Diaz said the State Board of Education had adopted rules to protect student data “to keep it out of the hands of bad actors,” adding that school districts, charter schools and state colleges “must take the necessary steps to protect their students from nefarious foreign actors such as the Chinese Communist Party.”

And last month, 13 lawmakers, led by U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Michigan, to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, saying Tutor.com “poses a significant national security threat.” They asked what measures the department had taken to assess “the potential national security risks associated with Tutor.com’s relationship.”

A spokesperson for Cardona did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Neily recently that Tutor.com’s Chinese ties are “something that just seemed to have slipped past the goalies.”

During a segment on the company, the show’s host alleged that providers like Tutor.com can gather data from even the youngest students and “adapt what they need to teach these kids to make sure they’re good, functional little robots.” He asked Neily, “Is that the plan?” 

She replied, “That very much seems to be the plan,” adding, “Let’s be honest, this data is not being secured by America’s best and brightest.”

Neily did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tutor.com’s Calvello said much of the alarm around the company’s Chinese ties stems from the parents’ group, which he said has been “promoting falsehoods” that lawmakers and others have amplified. As a result, he said, a few school districts have been under pressure to drop the service, with critics quoting the parents’ group’s materials. 

“We’re prepared to pursue legal avenues to protect our reputation and operations from false claims,” he said.

MathBOOST began last fall with six trained tutors — all of them parents or caregivers — working across four of the district’s 50 elementary campuses. It will expand to more than 20 tutors assisting children in 11 schools next year, said Oakland REACH’s CEO, Lakisha Young.

The tutors, or as Oakland REACH calls them, work inside the classroom alongside teachers and also pull children out for small group instruction, said Alicia Arenas, the district’s director of elementary instruction. 

“We really want our kids to be algebra-ready by the time that they enter middle school and high school,” she said, adding that at least one principal reported that participating children truly enjoy the program. “And the teachers bring up the great math progress they’re seeing from students who work with the math tutors.”

She added that students who are not involved in the program regularly ask if they could join. 

Tutors are paid an hourly rate and qualify for full benefits. Most assist third- through fifth-grade students and two of the six work with younger children. All have strong ties to the district and were carefully chosen, Arenas said. 

“We were looking for that connection and that investment in Oakland and OUSD,” she said. “We also wanted our tutors to represent the community that they serve.”

Some are graduates while others have children in the district. Math tutor Janine Godfrey, 55, works primarily at Garfield Elementary School. She said she helps children better understand their lessons and maintain their focus on the subject during class. 

“I chose this work because I have spent the last three years working through the middle school math curriculum with my son and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed math and teaching,” said Godfrey, who has run her own catering business for 25 years. “It felt like it was time to give back to the community and this felt like a perfect fit for me.”

Godfrey said she’s been moved by the students’ openness and by their ability to forge a solid bond with her.

“I truly hope that the work we have done together will somehow inspire them to work hard in math — and perhaps even enjoy it once in a while,” she said. 

As part of the new tutoring effort, Oakland REACH launched a series of outreach-focused “Math Mindset” meetings at the Think College Now Elementary School campus. 

The organization uses the time to help parents confront their own insecurities around the subject — they remind participants of the groundbreaking strides and cultures made in the topic — as a means to improve their own students’ success. 

REACH secured several respected math educators of color to inspire families, Young said, adding that she hopes the gatherings will also serve to identify possible math tutors. 

Recruitment has been a challenge as many people in the Oakland school community identify themselves as “bad at math,”  an idea that leaves parents thinking they can’t help their children progress in the subject, Young said.  

“We have to employ a different strategy when it comes to bringing our communities along in math,” she said. “We need to do the work of building the confidence and awareness they need to feel like math is something in my ancestry.”

Young said REACH’s math-related efforts will extend beyond the school year as the organization recently secured a summertime partnership with the district. SummerBOOST will allow math tutoring at two pilot sites serving some 350 children in kindergarten through fourth grade. 

Children all over the country have long struggled with math. Systemic inequity has caused Black, Hispanic and poor children to fall behind even further than their peers nationwide, a gap that grew worse because of the pandemic. Fourth-grade NAEP scores fell a stunning five points in 2022 from 2019. Eighth graders suffered an eight-point drop in that same time period, erasing decades of growth.

Results are equally troubling in the Oakland district: scored proficient on the 2022-23 state math assessments. High school students fared even worse, with just 14.11% of 11th graders reaching that same benchmark.  

“The mindset shift is key,” Young said. 

Young started REACH eight years ago with the goal of empowering Black and brown families to advocate for a high-quality education for their children. During the pandemic, REACH launched the Virtual Family Hub, providing online learning opportunities to families that resulted in significant literacy gains for students. 

In its December 2021 Hub parent satisfaction survey, 88% of families wanted more math intervention support for their children. So, after crafting an effective literacy model, the group turned its attention to math. 

“Let’s go back to K-2 when they are most flexible around deficits and excited about learning,” Young said. “This is a full frontal attack.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to The Oakland REACH and ���˶���.

In the annals of artificial intelligence, Feb. 16, 2011, was a watershed moment.

That day, IBM’s Watson supercomputer finished off a three-game shellacking of Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Trailing by over $30,000, Jennings, now the show’s host, wrote out his Final Jeopardy answer in mock resignation: “I, for one, welcome our computer overlords.”

A lark to some, the experience galvanized Satya Nitta, a longtime computer researcher at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Tasked with figuring out how to apply the supercomputer’s powers to education, he soon envisioned tackling ed tech’s most sought-after challenge: the world’s first tutoring system driven by artificial intelligence. It would offer truly personalized instruction to any child with a laptop — no human required.

“I felt that they’re ready to do something very grand in the space,” he said in an interview. 

Nitta persuaded his bosses to throw more than $100 million at the effort, bringing together 130 technologists, including 30 to 40 Ph.D.s, across research labs on four continents. 

But by 2017, the tutoring moonshot was essentially dead, and Nitta had concluded that effective, long-term, one-on-one tutoring is “a terrible use of AI — and that remains today.”

For all its jaw-dropping power, Watson the computer overlord was a weak teacher. It couldn’t engage or motivate kids, inspire them to reach new heights or even keep them focused on the material — all qualities of the best mentors.

It’s a finding with some resonance to our current moment of AI-inspired doomscrolling about the future of humanity in a world of ascendant machines. “There are some things AI is actually very good for,” Nitta said, “but it’s not great as a replacement for humans.”

His five-year journey to essentially a dead-end could also prove instructive as ChatGPT and other programs like it fuel a renewed, multimillion-dollar experiment to, in essence, prove him wrong.

Some of the leading lights of ed tech, from to , are trying to pick up where Watson left off, offering AI tools that promise to help teach students. Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, last year said AI has the potential to bring “probably the ” that education has ever seen. He wants to give “every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”

A 25-year journey

To be sure, research on high-dosage, one-on-one, in-person tutoring is : It’s interventions available, offering significant improvement in students’ academic performance, particularly in subjects like math, reading and writing.  

But traditional tutoring is also “breathtakingly expensive and hard to scale,” said Paige Johnson, a vice president of education at Microsoft. One school district in West Texas, for example, recently spent in federal pandemic relief funds to tutor 6,000 students. The expense, Johnson said, puts it out of reach for most parents and school districts. 

For IBM, the opportunity to rebalance the equation in kids’ favor was hard to resist. 

The Watson lab is legendary in the computer science field, with and six Turing Award winners among its ranks. It’s where modern was invented, and home to countless other innovations such as barcodes and the magnetic stripes on credit cards that make . It’s also where, in 1997, Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, essentially inventing the notion that AI could “think” like a person.

The heady atmosphere, Nitta recalled, inspired “a very deep responsibility to do something significant and not something trivial.”

Within a few years of Watson’s victory, Nitta, who had arrived in 2000 as a chip technologist, rose to become IBM Research’s global head of AI solutions for learning. For the Watson project, he said, “I was just given a very open-ended responsibility: Take Watson and do something with it in education.”

Nitta spent a year simply reading up on how learning works. He studied cognitive science, neuroscience and the decades-long history of “intelligent tutoring systems” in academia. Foremost in his reading list was the research of Stanford neuroscientist Vinod Menon, who’d put elementary schoolers through a 12-week math tutoring session, collecting before-and-after scans of their brains using an MRI. Tutoring, he found, produced nothing less than an increase in neural connectivity. 

Nitta returned to his bosses with the idea of an AI-powered cognitive tutor. “There’s something I can do here that’s very compelling,” he recalled saying, “that can broadly transform learning itself. But it’s a 25-year journey. It’s not a two-, three-, four-year journey.”

IBM drafted two of the highest-profile partners possible in education: the children’s media powerhouse Sesame Workshop and Pearson, the international publisher.

One product envisioned was a voice-activated Elmo doll that would serve as a kind of digital tutoring companion, interacting fully with children. Through brief conversations, it would assess their skills and provide spoken responses to help kids advance.

Meanwhile, Pearson promised that it could soon allow college students to “dialogue with Watson in real time.”

Nitta’s team began designing lessons and putting them in front of students — both in classrooms and in the lab. In order to nurture a back-and-forth between student and machine, they didn’t simply present kids with multiple-choice questions, instead asking them to write responses in their own words.

It didn’t go well.

Some students engaged with the chatbot, Nitta said. “Other students were just saying, ‘IDK’ [I don’t know]. So they simply weren’t responding.” Even those who did began giving shorter and shorter answers. 

Nitta and his team concluded that a cold reality lay at the heart of the problem: For all its power, Watson was not very engaging. Perhaps as a result, it also showed “little to no discernible impact” on learning. It wasn’t just dull; it was ineffective.

“Human conversation is very rich,” he said. “In the back and forth between two people, I’m watching the evolution of your own worldview.” The tutor influences the student — and vice versa. “There’s this very shared understanding of the evolution of discourse that’s very profound, actually. I just don’t know how you can do that with a soulless bot. And I’m a guy who works in AI.”

When students’ usage time dropped, “we had to be very honest about that,” Nitta said. “And so we basically started saying, ‘OK, I don’t think this is actually correct. I don’t think this idea — that an intelligent tutoring system will tutor all kids, everywhere, all the time — is correct.”

‘We missed something important’

IBM soon switched gears, debuting another crowd-pleasing Watson variation — this time, a touching throwback: It engaged in . In a televised demonstration in 2019, it went up against debate champ Harish Natarajan on the topic “Should we subsidize preschools?” Among its arguments for funding, the supercomputer offered, without a whiff of irony, that good preschools can prevent “future crime.” Its current iteration, , focuses on helping businesses build AI applications like “intelligent customer care.” 

Nitta left IBM, eventually taking several colleagues with him to create a startup called . It uses voice-activated AI to safely help teachers do workaday tasks such as updating digital gradebooks, opening PowerPoint presentations and emailing students and parents. 

Thirteen years after Watson’s stratospheric Jeopardy! victory and more than one year into the Age of ChatGPT, Nitta’s expectations about AI couldn’t be more down-to-earth: His AI powers what’s basically “a carefully designed assistant” to fit into the flow of a teacher’s day. 

To be sure, AI can do sophisticated things such as generating quizzes from a class reading and editing student writing. But the idea that a machine or a chatbot can actually teach as a human can, he said, represents “a profound misunderstanding of what AI is actually capable of.” 

Nitta, who still holds deep respect for the Watson lab, admits, “We missed something important. At the heart of education, at the heart of any learning, is engagement. And that’s kind of the Holy Grail.”

These notions aren’t news to those who do tutoring for a living. , which offers live and online tutoring in 500 school districts, relies on AI to power a lesson plan creator that helps personalize instruction. But when it comes to the actual tutoring, humans deliver it, said , chief institution officer at , which operates Varsity.

”The AI isn’t far enough along yet to do things like facial recognition and understanding of student focus,” said Salcito, who spent 15 years at Microsoft, most of them as vice president of worldwide education. “One of the things that we hear from teachers is that the students love their tutors. I’m not sure we’re at a point where students are going to love an AI agent.”

The No. 1 factor in a student’s tutoring success is consistently, research suggests. As smart and efficient as an AI chatbot might be, it’s an open question whether most students, especially struggling ones, would show up for an inanimate agent or develop a sense of respect for its time.

When Salcito thinks about what AI bots now do in education, he’s not impressed. Most, he said, “aren’t going far enough to really rethink how learning can take place.” They end up simply as fast, spiffed-up search engines. 

In most cases, he said, the power of one-on-one, in-person tutoring often emerges as students begin to develop more honesty about their abilities, advocate for themselves and, in a word, demand more of school. “In the classroom, a student may say they understand a problem. But they come clean to the tutor, where they expose, ‘Hey, I need help.’”

Cognitive science suggests that for students who aren’t motivated or who are uncertain about a topic, only will help. That requires a focused, caring human, watching carefully, asking tons of questions and reading students’ cues. 

Jeremy Roschelle, a learning scientist and an executive director of Digital Promise, a federally funded research center, said usage with most ed tech products tends to drop off. “Kids get a little bored with it. It’s not unique to tutors. There’s a newness factor for students. They want the next new thing.” 

Even now, Nitta points out, research shows that big commercial AI applications don’t seem to hold users’ attention as well as top entertainment and social media sites like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. dubbed the user engagement of sites like ChatGPT “lackluster,” finding that the proportion of monthly active users who engage with them in a single day was only about 14%, suggesting that such sites aren’t very “sticky” for most users.

For social media sites, by contrast, it’s between 60% and 65%. 

One notable AI exception: , an app that allows users to create companions of their own among figures from history and fiction and chat with the likes of Socrates and Bart Simpson. It has a stickiness score of 41%.

As startups like offer “your child’s superhuman tutor,” starting at $29 per month, and publicly tests its popular Khanmigo AI tool, Nitta maintains that there’s little evidence from learning science that, absent a strong outside motivation, people will spend enough time with a chatbot to master a topic.

“We are a very deeply social species,” said Nitta, “and we learn from each other.”

IBM declined to comment on its work in AI and education, as did Sesame Workshop. A Pearson spokesman said that since last fall it has been ​​beta-testing AI study tools keyed to its e-textbooks, among other efforts, with plans this spring to expand the number of titles covered. 

Getting ‘unstuck’

IBM’s experiences notwithstanding, the search for an AI tutor has continued apace, this time with more players than just a legacy research lab in suburban New York. Using the latest affordances of so-called large language models, or LLMs, technologists at Khan Academy believe they are finally making the first halting steps in the direction of an effective AI tutor. 

Kristen DiCerbo remembers the moment her mind began to change about AI. 

It was September 2022, and she’d only been at Khan Academy for a year-and-a-half when she and founder Khan got access to a beta version of ChatGPT. Open AI, ChatGPT’s creator, had asked Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for more funding, but he told them not to come back until the chatbot could pass an Advanced Placement biology exam.

So Open AI queried Khan for sample AP biology questions. He and DiCerbo said they’d help in exchange for a peek at the bot — and a chance to work with the startup. They were among the first people outside of Open AI to get their hands on GPT-4, the LLM that powers the upgraded version of ChatGPT. They were able to test out the AI and, in the process, become amateur AI before anyone had even heard of the term. 

Like many users typing in queries in those first heady days, the pair initially just marveled at the sophistication of the tool and its ability to return what felt, for all the world, like personalized answers. With DiCerbo working from her home in Phoenix and Khan from the nonprofit’s Silicon Valley office, they traded messages via Slack.

“We spent a couple of days just going back and forth, Sal and I, going, ‘Oh my gosh, look what we did! Oh my gosh, look what it’s saying — this is crazy!’” she told an audience during a recent at the University of Notre Dame. 

She recounted asking the AI to help write a mystery story in which shoes go missing in an apartment complex. In the back of her mind, DiCerbo said, she planned to make a dog the shoe thief, but didn’t reveal that to ChatGPT. “I started writing it, and it did the reveal,” she recalled. “It knew that I was thinking it was going to be a dog that did this, from just the little clues I was planting along the way.”

More tellingly, it seemed to do something Watson never could: have engaging conversations with students.

DiCerbo recounted talking to a high school student they were working with who told them about an interaction she’d had with ChatGPT around The Great Gatsby. She asked it about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous , which scholars have long interpreted as symbolizing Jay Gatsby’s out-of-reach hopes and dreams.

“It comes back to her and asks, ‘Do you have hopes and dreams just out of reach?’” DiCerbo recalled. “It had this whole conversation” with the student.

The pair soon tore up their 2023 plans for Khan Academy. 

It was a stunning turn of events for DiCerbo, a Ph.D. educational psychologist and former senior Pearson research scientist who had spent more than a year on the failed Watson project. In 2016, Pearson that Watson would soon be able to chat with college students in real time to guide them in their studies. But it was DiCerbo’s teammates, about 20 colleagues, who had to actually train the supercomputer on thousands of student-generated answers to questions from textbooks — and tempt instructors to rate those answers. 

Like Nitta, DiCerbo recalled that at first things went well. They found a natural science textbook with a large user base and set Watson to work. “You would ask it a couple of questions and it would seem like it was doing what we wanted to,” answering student questions via text.

But invariably if a student’s question strayed from what the computer expected, she said, “it wouldn’t know how to answer that. It had no ability to freeform-answer questions, or it would do so in ways that didn’t make any sense.” 

After more than a year of labor, she realized, “I had never seen the ‘OK, this is going to work’ version” of the hoped-for tutor. “I was always at the ‘OK, I hope the next version’s better.’”

But when she got a taste of ChatGPT, DiCerbo immediately saw that, even in beta form, the new bot was different. Using software that quickly predicted the most likely next word in any conversation, ChatGPT was able to engage with its human counterpart in what seemed like a personal way.

Since its debut in March 2023, Khanmigo has turned heads with what many users say is a helpful, easy-to-use, natural language interface, though a few users have pointed out that it sometimes .

Surprisingly, DiCerbo doesn’t consider the popular chatbot a full-time tutor. As sophisticated as AI might now be in motivating students to, for instance, try again when they make a mistake, “It’s not a human,” she said. “It’s also not their friend.”

Khan Academy’s shows their tool is effective with as little as 30 minutes of practice and feedback per week. But even as many startups promise the equivalent of a one-on-one human tutor, DiCerbo cautions that 30 minutes is not going to produce miracles. Khanmigo, she said, “is not a solution that’s going to replace a human in your life,” she said. “It’s a tool in your toolbox that can help you get unstuck.”

‘A couple of million years of human evolution’

For his part, Nitta says that for all the progress in AI, he’s not persuaded that we’re any closer to a real-live tutor that would offer long-term help to most students. If anything, Khanmigo and probabilistic tools like it may prove to be effective “homework helpers.” But that’s where he draws the line. 

“I have no problem calling it that, but don’t call it a tutor,” he said. “You’re trying to endow it with human-like capabilities when there are none.”  

Unlike humans, who will typically do their best to respond genuinely to a question, the way AI bots work —by digesting pre-existing texts and other information to come up with responses that seem human — is akin to a “statistical illusion,” writes Harvard Business School Professor . “They’ve just been well-trained by humans to respond to humans.”

Largely because of this, Nitta said, there’s little evidence that a chatbot will continuously engage people as a good human tutor would.

What would change his mind? Several years of research by an independent third party showing that tools like Khanmigo actually make a difference on a large scale — something that doesn’t exist yet.

DiCerbo also maintains her hard-won skepticism. She knows all about the halting early decades of computers a century ago, when experimental, punch-card operated “teaching machines” guided students through rudimentary multiple-choice lessons, often with simple rewards at the end. 

In her talks, DiCerbo urges caution about AI revolutionizing education. As much as anyone, she is aware of the expensive failures that have come before. 

In her recent talk at Notre Dame, she did her best to manage expectations of the new AI, which seems so limitless. In one-to-one teaching, she said, there’s an element of humanity “that we have not been able to — and probably should not try — to replicate in artificial intelligence.” In that respect, she’s in agreement with Nitta: Human relationships are key to learning. In the talk, she noted that students who have a person in school who cares about their learning have higher graduation rates. 

But still.

ChatGPT now has 100 million weekly users, according to . That record-fast uptake makes her think “there’s something interesting and sticky about this for people that we haven’t seen in other places.”

Being able to engineer prompts in plain English opens the door for more people, not just engineers, to create tools quickly and iterate on what works, she said. That democratization could mean the difference between another failed undertaking and agile tools that actually deliver at least a version of Watson’s promise. 

Seven years after he left IBM to start his new endeavor, Nitta is philosophical about the effort. He takes virtually full responsibility for the failure of the Watson moonshot. In retrospect, even his 25-year timeline for success may have been naive.

“What I didn’t appreciate is, I actually was stepping into a couple of million years of human evolution,” he said. “That’s the thing I didn’t appreciate at the time, which I do in the fullness of time: Mistakes happen at various levels, but this was an important one.”

Such is the region’s struggle to staff classrooms that half of Jackson’s teachers are unlicensed. Yet, in spring 2023, as schools nationwide struggled to stem a persistent decline in test scores in the wake of the pandemic, 81% of Jackson students participating in an ambitious new online tutoring program showed significant growth on their early literacy assessment after just 10 weeks. 

I spent the past year visiting Jackson and eight other schools across three states and the District of Columbia to understand how and why their successful tutoring programs work and the challenges they’ve had to navigate. Our also included dozens of conversations with educators, school district leaders, providers, researchers and others who have turned to tutoring to combat learning loss after COVID.

Here are lessons I learned:

Not all tutoring is equal. While some less-intensive programs, such as on-demand tutoring that students use at their discretion, may be easier to implement, they typically don’t yield strong results. On the other hand, high-dosage tutoring — four or fewer students working on material linked to classroom instruction with the same tutor for at least 30 minutes during the school day, three times a week for at least several months — makes a meaningful difference. The successful programs we studied shared these features, even as they achieved strong results using different types of tutors — including virtual professionals and college students and AmeriCorps volunteers working in person — in urban, rural, elementary and secondary schools.

Done right, tutoring has many allies. Tutoring represents a rare point of convergence spanning national policy priorities, research evidence and what educators on the ground need and want. Unlike the education reforms embedded in other federal education directives or policymakers’ pet priorities, high-quality, high-dosage tutoring has been warmly embraced by most school staff in the programs we studied. One reason is that teachers are able to measure tutoring’s impact on their students’ performance. Another is that they feel supported rather than burdened by tutors, in part because tutoring content tracks closely to their classroom instruction. 

Leadership is key. The successful tutoring initiatives we studied all had leaders with dedicated roles. Whether it was Carina Escajeda, the high-impact tutoring manager in the Ector County Independent School District in Odessa, Texas; Kate Boyle, the fellowship director at Great Oaks Charter School in New York City; or Lauren May and Shauna Walters, the teacher-trainers for Teach for America’s Ignite tutoring model in Jackson Elementary School, there were staffers who made the tutoring trains run on time. Tutoring leads who also performed another role in school were paid extra.

Autonomy for principals and teachers matters. While the tutoring leads kept things running, the school leaders and educators we studied had some degree of autonomy in implementing the programs in their buildings — whether that meant choosing among district-approved vendors, selecting curricular materials for tutors to use, or adjusting the school day to incorporate tutoring in ways they thought best. Providing local educators with ownership increases their buy-in and often results in tutoring programs tailored to precisely what a given district or school needs to boost student achievement.

Relationships with tutors motivate students. I found that many kinds of tutors — college students, recent college graduates or professionals hired through an external vendor — built strong relationships with students, even when they worked with them virtually. Those relationships, students told us, were often as valuable as the academic support tutors provided — an important insight at a time when many young people are struggling emotionally. 

Federal funding sources like AmeriCorps are a path to sustainability. Since the beginning of the pandemic, as many as 80% of U.S. school districts have implemented tutoring programs, according to the federal . The challenge now is to fine-tune implementation, bring the benefits of high-impact tutoring to even more students in each district and find ways to sustain it after schools’ federal COVID relief funding expires later this year.

Funding for states and school districts in Titles I, II, III and IV of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act could be tapped for tutoring once the pandemic-recovery money ends. If districts can connect tutoring with Response to Intervention, a program designed for early identification of struggling students or those with disabilities, districts could fund tutoring through Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

But two other federal resources — the work-study program for college students and AmeriCorps — could bring thousands of undergraduates and young adults into the nation’s schools as tutors. In just one existing program, TFA Ignite, more than 1,500 undergraduates from more than 300 colleges and universities are tutoring over 3,500 students; in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., the Go Foundation is placing several hundred recent college graduates as AmeriCorps fellows in full-time tutoring positions in charter and traditional public schools.

Congressional Republicans are threatening to defund the work-study and AmeriCorps programs, but expanding them instead and reducing red tape would bring many service-oriented young people into schools as tutors and introduce them to teaching at a moment when the nation is facing sustained shortages in the classroom — a scenario I saw play out in schools I studied. 

Local education leaders wondering whether to stick with their tutoring investments as funding becomes more uncertain should ask whether other initiatives on behalf of students enjoy the same widespread support, yield the same academic results and allow for equally valuable student-adult relationships. It’s a high bar.

She was the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools when Saga Education, a nonprofit offering in-person tutoring during the school day, had remarkable results with ninth and 10th graders in the city who had fallen behind in math. scored higher on tests, got better grades and passed classes at higher rates.

“Right away, I saw excitement from our principals,” she told ���˶���. “It was a phenomenal program.”

There was one problem: At the time, it cost $2,600 per student. “The finances didn’t work,” she said.

Three years after she stepped down from her position in Chicago, Jackson chairs the board of Accelerate, a position that grants her a national perspective on K-12 tutoring needs.

Only about 1 in 10 students who need high-dosage tutoring get it, despite evidence of persistent learning loss, according to released last year. To address the challenge, Accelerate recently brought researchers, providers and state leaders to Washington to discuss how to spread effective programs to more students.

Over a day and half, they discussed innovative models, the potential of AI in tutoring programs and the need for clearer data on its impact.  

“We already have decades of research that shows tutoring frequency matters, the teacher matters, the alignment to curriculum,” said Jackson. “What we don’t know is how to do that in this new learning environment. like virtual and small groups.”

But tutoring isn’t the only thing on Jackson’s mind. As she becomes more prominent nationally, she remains a “critical voice” on issues facing the district she once led, said Daniel Anello, CEO of Kids First Chicago, an advocacy organization that helps parents understand education policy.

“She’s a parent, she went through the system,” he said. “And from a racial equity standpoint, she’s always been very laser focused on ensuring that families that are the most marginalized are centered in decisions.”

In December, she spoke up when the district’s appointed school board passed a that embraced neighborhood schools but also signaled a desire to move away from school choice. 

In , she called the resolution “wrong” and accused the board — appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teachers union organizer — of pursuing an anti-charter agenda. 

“There is no justification for taking away the rights of parents and putting the interests of their children at risk,” she wrote.

In an interview, Jackson said while she’s not opposed to neighborhood schools, she feels Chicago’s families have been left out of discussions about the future of their district. She also discussed her work as head of Hope Chicago, an initiative that offers free college to low-income students and parents, and elaborated on her vision for expanding high-quality tutoring.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

���˶���: High-dosage tutoring has become the most-recommended strategy for helping students recover from learning loss. Can you talk about your experience with tutoring in Chicago? 

Janice Jackson: The study that everyone cites was the [a nonprofit that provides high-dosage tutoring in math]. Right away, I saw excitement from our principals. It was a phenomenal program, but it cost us $2,600 per student at the time. The finances didn’t work. Today, a lot has transpired in this space, which is why I was attracted to Accelerate. I’m excited about being able to do this at scale and cheaper, because that’s what’s going to make it sustainable. That is what is going to help low-income districts that don’t have enough money. 

We have about 50 studies underway. To really see what’s working allows us to move a little bit faster than education typically moves.

At Accelerate’s recent conference in Washington, there was a lot of talk about how to continue providing students extra support when federal relief funds run out. If you were still running a district, how would you approach that?

I’d leverage online and tech tools a lot more than we did pre-pandemic. We did some things during the pandemic because we were forced to, but I’ve been out in the field and I’ve seen a lot of ways we can leverage technology that aren’t as dependent on humans. It frees up the teachers and frees up other staff members to do the real work, which is to get in front of kids and families and figure out what it’s going to take for them to come to school regularly.

I would pay a lot more attention to accelerated learning. We don’t talk enough about that. We keep talking about recovery, and that is a huge deal, but we can use technology to accelerate learning. In traditional neighborhood schools, there are always a handful of kids who could take advantage of an incredibly rigorous curriculum. Maybe they can’t offer that in the school because of the budget, or maybe they don’t have enough students, but you can access that through technology, through districtwide courses. 

Is Accelerate supporting research on the tech side of tutoring as well? 

Yes. The thing that really excited me about Accelerate was the idea that we were going to actually research some of these virtual options. Like so many educators, I saw the proliferation of all these tools, and there’s a lot of crap out there. Don’t make that the headline, but that’s the truth. There are some good tools, too. We need to be able to assess that with rigorous evaluation models. I care a lot about education, but I care even more about quality education.

You also care a lot about college access. What are you learning from your work with Hope Chicago?

Our goal is to narrow the economic and wealth gap for Black and Latino families, and we do that by offering them debt-free college. It sounds simple, but why don’t we do that in this country? We made a lot of progress in Chicago with and . One of the biggest things we learned is that our students and families are more discerning around the financial risk of college than we give them credit for. I remember one student said to me, “If I go to college and I don’t graduate, I’m going to be worse off financially than the person who just sat at home.” That’s a very true —and smart —insight.

With Hope Chicago, we’ve seen students select more competitive schools, and then we also allow one parent or guardian to go to college with them. Last fall, we had 93 parents enrolled in college. 

Are other cities looking at what you’re doing?

We haven’t had anybody else say, “Hey, we want to totally adopt this and take it to another place.” But I want to be clear, I signed up for this for the opportunity to really disrupt higher education. I think we’ll get free community college, but I would love to see, in my lifetime, free college. The United States is behind in education. What if every state in America had a free four-year option, if you make below a certain amount? That is doable, and I would argue is actually necessary for this country. 

At the turn of the 20th century, only about 9% of Americans had a high school diploma. We created a higher education system because America was emerging as a superpower. You needed an educated populace. America is reaching that same inflection point. We’re not going to maintain our same global positioning if we continue on the path we’re going. The demographics of this country are changing. We know in 2045, the majority of the people in America are going to be Latino. But they’re not being educated at the same rate as white Americans.

People would actually go to college in much higher numbers if it wasn’t so expensive. This country can afford to do more.

As you take on these broader challenges, you’re still very connected to the Chicago schools and you’ve had a lot to say about how the school board’s recent resolution affects Chicago families. Why did you write that op-ed?

This is the thing that really angers me. People think it’s OK to tell poor Black and Latino people where their kids need to go. Nobody would ever question a person of means about where they send their children. Nobody questions white people about where they send their children. But we continue to do this.

If we pushed the button today, and everybody had to attend their neighborhood school in Chicago, Black kids would benefit the least from a system like that, and they actually exercise choice at a higher level than any other group. I don’t speak on behalf of the entire community, but I am a leader in the Black community, and I feel like it’s my responsibility to lift my voice up around this issue. 

You think the timing is wrong?

We’re getting ready to make a decision that literally impacts everybody. If you really believe in participatory democracy and an elected school board, why is an appointed school board making this decision? If people vote for board members and they support this and that’s the way it goes, I believe in that.

Let’s not pretend like a resolution is not important. I don’t know where people can rightfully lift up their voices to say, “This isn’t right for my community or let’s have a discussion.” 

Will this resolution hurt enrollment even more?

Black people are — largely working class and middle class Black people, so that has changed communities in a lot of different ways. We think people aren’t paying attention. They may not find time to sit on Twitter all day and argue about it, or come to the city council meeting, or come to the board meeting, but what they do is vote with their feet. They just leave.

There’s a moratorium on school closures until 2025, but it’s likely closures will take place in the future. How did you approach that process when you were in leadership?

Let me talk about Englewood, because that’s indicative of how I think Chicago should deal with enrollment. We had four comprehensive high schools in Englewood that in their heyday, probably had 4,000 students across all four high schools. When we took action, they had maybe [a total of] 400 students. We put out a plan to close those four high schools and consolidate them into one big comprehensive high school and build a brand new building. 

A school is the most well-resourced institution in these communities. When you take that away, you need to put something back. Slapping a name change on an existing building is not going to do it. You have to create a new investment and opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, they called me every name under the sun, but I worked with the community. I didn’t stop showing up. To me, we needed to do that in about seven neighborhoods in Chicago. Ultimately, we didn’t start that plan, because COVID happened. 

I am against a large-scale closing. It should be planned. It shows respect when you lay out a five- or 10-year plan and people know what’s going on. 

This resolution, concerns about enrollment loss — it’s all happening as the city is about to elect school board members for the first time in almost 30 years. How is the community preparing? 

If a mom from Englewood ends up on the board, I’m all for that. But I just haven’t seen that happen. It’s usually special interests versus the union, or the reform community versus the union, and neither group represents the parents. There should be a media campaign. If you walk down the street in Chicago and ask 10 parents, they probably could not tell you anything about what’s coming, and that is a problem.

This is a big change. Parents should be informed, they should be engaged and that’s on the city to do that. 

Disclosure: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to and ���˶���.

However, focusing on that type of COVID recovery framework feels less and less meaningful with each passing day. Since the start of the pandemic, most students have moved up multiple grade levels (or graduated!), and districts are already in the last year of their federal emergency COVID relief funds. 

There isn’t and won’t be an educational equivalent to the World Health Organization or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proclaiming the end to the global health emergency. But it’s time for a new framework that shifts from a temporary recovery mindset to a more lasting and permanent emphasis on growth, equity and continuous improvement. 

What could that look like? There’s a growing consensus around three key levers: getting kids back in school, expanding and monitoring high-dose tutoring and increasing summer or afterschool learning time. Along with the Biden administration’s recent proposal for $8 billion in , researchers such as are all pointing to the same problem areas and potential solutions. 

Three structural shifts must happen to address the needs of the next generation.

First, students must get back in school. consistently that attendance, behavioral infractions and successful completion of academic coursework are strong predictors of outcomes like high school graduation, college attendance and college persistence. That’s true even after controlling for a student’s standardized test scores. In fact, in , NWEA’s Megan Kuhfeld and colleagues at the University of Maryland and Stanford found that measuring academic behaviors such as regular attendance also did a good job of capturing other social-emotional skills like self-management, a belief in one’s ability to succeed, growth mindset and empathy for others from diverse backgrounds. 

Their work also uncovered a promising nugget for policymakers. Given how strongly partial-day absenteeism predicted long-run outcomes, policymakers could consider tracking and monitoring it closely. Other factors, such as tardiness, referrals for in-school discipline and participation in extracurricular activities are also relatively easy to measure and potentially contain rich information about students. Tracking these interim outcomes — and then helping students improve on them — is likely to help boost longer-term outcomes as well. 

Second, students who need it most should receive high-dosage tutoring. There’s finding that students who complete high-dosage tutoring post impressively in test scores when those programs are implemented appropriately. That research has convinced to create or expand their tutoring programs. But as the federal ESSER funding cliff approaches, policymakers should work with local education leaders to sustain high-quality, high-dose tutoring programs that are delivering the biggest gains for academically at-risk students. 

Third, schools should provide extra learning time through summer programs. Like tutoring, intensive, short-term interventions during summer vacations and other school breaks have shown success in raising student achievement. Multiple studies on the effects of summer learning programs have found positive impacts on student outcomes, especially in . Those producing the strongest gains tend to offer for and pair struggling students with the most effective teachers.

Learning programs during shorter school breaks can also boost student achievement. For example, the Lawrence, Massachusetts, district offered week-long acceleration academies to students who were having difficulty in a particular subject. They were placed in small groups of 10 to 12 and taught by carefully selected educators. In total, students received about 25 hours of extra instruction per week, and the program was a key part of the district’s successful . 

As the sun sets on the COVID recovery era, state and district leaders will need to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of their investments in things like tutoring, summer programs and acceleration efforts. It has always been important to understand which programs or interventions are working, for which students and at what cost. Those questions must now be part of the new normal.

The proposed Academic Acceleration and Achievement Grants, part of the administration’s for fiscal year 2025, would target three strategies Education Secretary Miguel Cardona highlighted in January — addressing chronic absenteeism, offering high-impact tutoring and extending learning afterschool and during the summer. 

In a call with reporters, an education department official said the competitive grant program would help put the recovery efforts districts launched with relief dollars “on an even faster track and sustain the improvements that states have put into place.” But to make space for the administration’s priorities, leaders are recommending a few cuts, including a $40 million reduction to a program that provides start-up funds for charter schools.

The announcement of the grant program follows the showing most students still haven’t caught up to pre-pandemic performance levels. But with the current fiscal year budget still delayed by partisan over spending for defense and the IRS, advocates acknowledged that passing a substantial new program will be tough.

The proposal will face “the political realities of heading into an election year and the limitations of the budget,” said Nakia Towns, chief operating officer of Accelerate, a national initiative funding tutoring research and programs. The organization’s leaders began discussing how to provide new funds for tutoring efforts with department officials and the White House last fall, Towns said. But she added that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed concerns about students struggling to catch up.

“Everybody has been in agreement that kids still need more support, schools still need more support for learning recovery,” she said. “Now it’s about what actually gets over the goal posts in the budget process.”

Overall, the Education Department is asking for $82 billion for next fiscal year — a $3.1 billion increase. The proposal keeps spending in line with the caps enacted last year in a to avoid the federal government defaulting on its financial obligations. In his comments, Cardona contrasted the Biden administration’s track record on education with that of his presidential challenger Donald Trump and his Republican colleagues in Congress. 

“This is a budget request that comes on top of three years of historic investments proposed by President Biden and delivered with support from many in Congress,” he said. “It blows the Trump budgets out of the water.”

It includes $18.6 billion for Title I, a $200 million increase over the current 2023 level; a $25 million preschool grant program; and $14.4 billion for special education, also a $200 million increase.

But to keep spending within the federal spending limit, the department targeted the Charter Schools Program, recommending a $40 million cut to the $440 million program. In response, Eric Paisner, acting president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said the budget proposal “falls disappointingly short of prioritizing public charter schools and public educational options for parents who are looking for something better.”

The National Parents Union also criticized the move, saying the program “has played a vital role in empowering communities to establish public, accountable schools tailored to the unique needs of students.”

But the advocacy group welcomed the new competitive grant program, calling it part of the administration’s “deep-seated commitment to not only recovering from the setbacks of recent years, but also to advancing our educational system to new heights.”

The proposal is unlikely to receive a friendly reception in the House, where the Republican majority has frequently reminded the public of the harmful impact of long school closures, particularly in blue states and cities with strong teachers unions. During a , some members suggested districts had either or have little to show for the historic investment.

“I think it unlikely that congressional Republicans would want to shower another $8 billion on school systems,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Schools took far too long to open, express any urgency about absenteeism or learning loss, or start trying to convince the public and policymakers that the dollars were being spent effectively.”

In a statement, North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, who chairs the House education committee, said the budget plan “would gobble up more taxpayer dollars without any shred of accountability.”

Charting ‘a path forward’

Towns, former deputy superintendent for the Gwinnett County Public Schools, near Atlanta, noted that the American Rescue Plan, which required districts to spend 20% of their funds to address learning loss, lacked requirements to ensure the dollars were spent on effective programs. 

Accelerate, however, has urged the administration to ask for more data from districts so they can demonstrate that “kids are getting the intensity and consistency of tutoring that we know is needed in order for it to actually make a difference,” she said. 

Many districts used relief funds to implement strong tutoring programs, added Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University. In January, FutureEd released her report highlighting some of those efforts, including Teach for America’s Ignite program, which this year has over 1,500 college students tutoring 3,500 elementary and middle school students in 21 states. 

She also noted Texas’s Ector County Independent School District, which implemented a contract that rewards tutoring providers with higher pay if students make significant progress.

“There is so much great tutoring happening already and I would love to see us learn from what’s working right now as we chart a path forward,” Cohen said.

One sign that districts are more focused on results for students is the growth of , a technology company that offers an online platform for districts to store tutoring data, such as the number of sessions scheduled and whether students attend. The business received a from Accelerate in 2022. 

Some states and districts initially signed contracts with online, on-demand tutoring providers, but research later showed that students often didn’t use the services. Pearl founder John Failla said he’s noticed greater interest in districts using models that experts recommend.

“All of our data is pointing towards states and districts wanting to run their own programs with their own tutors … versus working with online vendors,” he said.

Almost 450 districts now use the system, with the number of sessions growing from about 13,600 in February 2023 to almost 80,000 a year later.

Cohen added that GOP-led states are among those that have made tutoring and summer learning programs a high priority. Tennessee launched its tutoring program in 2020, which is expected to reach 200,000 students by this summer. And Alabama has concentrated recovery efforts during the summer, with .

As they weigh the president’s budget request, Cohen said she hopes “Republicans choose to consider the success we’ve seen in many red states.”

Focused on schools in Washington, D.C., the preliminary results show middle school students attended an additional three days and those in the elementary grades improved their attendance by two days when they received tutoring during regular school hours.  

But high-impact tutoring —defined as at least 90 minutes a week with the same tutor, spread over multiple sessions — had the greatest impact on students who missed 30% or more of the prior school year. Their attendance improved by at least five days, according to the study from the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University-based center that conducts tutoring research. 

Susanna Loeb, who leads the center, called the data “the first evidence of a strong causal link between tutoring specifically and attendance.” 

Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, said it makes sense that students come to school more often when they’re keeping up in class and getting good grades. 

“Part of why kids don’t show up is because they don’t feel successful in school,” she said. Forming a connection with a tutor over several weeks or months can also make students more motivated to attend, she added. “I do think it’s an impact of high-dosage tutoring, not necessarily just tutoring.”

The early findings, which will be expanded in a future paper, reinforce the benefits of offering high-impact tutoring during the school day. The extra instructional time helps schools address two of their biggest post-pandemic problems — learning loss and chronic absenteeism, the researchers said. The White House has urged districts to not only target remaining federal relief funds toward those areas, but explore ways to sustain those efforts when they dry up. 

Districts that continue tutoring programs will likely keep “student achievement top of mind,” Loeb said, “with greater engagement — including increased attendance — as another outcome they hope to see.”

also demonstrated how to successfully integrate tutoring sessions into the school day. The state education agency, which has spent $35 million on the program, funds staff members in charge of rearranging the schedule to accommodate the sessions and track data on student participation. 

“They took that off the plate of the principal,” Christina Grant, D.C.’s state superintendent, said at a January conference hosted by Accelerate, an organization that works to scale high-dosage tutoring. She added that working with researchers like those from Stanford can help districts communicate the impact of federal relief funds. Without those partnerships, she said, “we would look back three years later and not be able to tell the authentic story around what happened to $35 million.”

The district, which had a chronic absenteeism rate of last school year, began its tutoring program in 2021. Officials awarded grants to a variety of providers, including , which focuses on high school math and teacher preparation program.

Sousa Middle School, in southeast D.C., works with George Washington University’s , which pays college students interested in STEM or education to work as tutors.

“My challenge, when this program first began, was getting students to come and not look at it as a form of punishment,” said Sharon Fitzgerald, Sousa’s tutoring manager. Now students who have “graduated” out of the program ask why they can’t come back. 

Students responded well, she said, because it’s a “break away from seeing their regular teachers every day” and because they look up to the college students. The tutors, she added, also have a clever way of giving students a taste of how much more they’ll learn during their next meeting and if they attend class everyday.

“It was what the tutors left them with in the last session that encouraged them to come to school,” Fitzgerald said.

The results are likely to spark more interest in how tutoring and attendance initiatives can work in tandem.

“We have not intentionally used tutors as a way to address attendance. I can imagine that it could help if part of their work focused on that,” said A.J. Gutierrez, co-founder of Saga Education. “I see potential.”

Chang, with Attendance Works, said the results are “on the right track,” but don’t go far enough. During the , several states still had chronic absenteeism rates over 30%, including Alaska, New Mexico and Oregon.

Tutoring doesn’t address all of the barriers that keep students from attending school, like health conditions or bullying, she said. But tutors could refer students to school attendance teams when those concerns surface.

“What more could we get,” she asked “if tutoring was tied to a bigger strategy, a more comprehensive approach?’ ”