Legislator

Even as students in Arkansas and across the nation struggle to recover from a "learning recession" that began more than a decade ago, a Stanford University researcher says parents should feel good about their children's access to quality tutoring.

Federal pandemic aid for schools dried up in the years following the initial COVID-19 outbreak, but many states have kept up tutoring efforts that were launched at the time, according to Nancy Waymack, director of partnerships and policy for the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford.

"As the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief dollars went away, we were concerned that tutoring might go away with them," Waymack said. "That wasn't really what we found."

Waymack, who grew up in Arkadelphia, is among the authors of a new snapshot report published Wednesday on tutoring policies in the United States. The report praises many states, including Arkansas, for maintaining strong investments in funding high-impact tutoring, implementation support and policy following the expiration of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, a pot of money Congress made available to states through a series of stimulus bills in 2020 and 2021.

High-impact tutoring (HIT), or high-dosage tutoring, is widely endorsed by educational leaders, advocates, and researchers to help improve outcomes for students. HIT is defined by several key components, all of which have been employed by Read Alliance since its inception (and long before the terminology of “high-impact tutoring” or “high-dosage tutoring” was defined and in use):

• Frequent (3+ times per week)
• Small group size (no more than four students per tutor, with one-to-one tutoring as the preferred model)
• Targeted instruction focused on specific skills or learning gaps, and designed to complement classroom instruction
• Led by trained instructors who receive ongoing support and oversight
• Consistent tutor-student relationship that fosters a strong connection over time

These components are largely attributed to Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA), in which Read Alliance (READ) is listed as a vetted provider which means the READ model meets their standards for excellence widely recognized as the “stamp of approval” for HIT programming.

In late 2024, Susanna Loeb, one of the nation’s leading researchers on tutoring, had doubts about the future of a field she’s worked hard to advance. 

Over $120 billion in federal COVID relief funds were expiring, leaving school leaders and tutoring providers uncertain whether programs would continue. The incoming administration was focused on slashing Department of Education spending, not issuing new grants. 

“We didn’t know if this administration would put anything into education,” said Loeb, a Stanford University professor who studies tutoring programs. “We were worried that all of the experimentation that had been going on and that access to tutoring would drop precipitously.” 

High-quality tutoring has emerged as an important post-pandemic strategy for helping struggling students in public schools. Research finds that tutoring often results in substantial additional learning gains when delivered during the school day, in small groups with the same tutors and multiple times a week for at least 10 weeks. 

But this often comes with a substantial price tag — depending on the model and staffing approach, costs can range from $1,200 to $2,500 per student per year. During the pandemic, many districts relied on federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds to launch or expand tutoring programs, but these have largely expired.

“Early literacy intervention makes all the difference, and through the LEARNS Act, literacy coaches, and high-impact tutoring, we’re building strong reading foundations from the start,” said Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “These awards recognize the work our educators are doing and the progress Arkansas is making to put students first. I’m grateful to President Trump and Secretary McMahon for their leadership in putting education back in the hands of states and communities so we can help every child read, learn, and thrive.”

The ADE has two major projects planned for the funding. The first project, in partnership with Air Reading, will be to evaluate high-impact tutoring initiatives at rural schools. It will also include an evaluation conducted by Stanford University to "assess impact and scalability."

High-impact tutoring has emerged as one form that researchers have shown actually works — when done well.

Stanford University researchers have found that high-impact tutoring works when it is embedded into the school day, happens at least three times per week in small groups, and matches the same tutors with students as much as possible. The Stanford researchers also found that tutoring is most effective when schools use data to identify students’ needs, and when tutoring materials align with research-backed and state standards.

Arkansas is not alone in providing funds to cover tutoring for struggling students. Among the dozens of other states with similar initiatives are such neighbors as Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, and farther flung states like Colorado, Rhode Island and Minnesota, according to the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University.

According to a research summary by the National Student Support Accelerator, tutoring can increase student achievement in reading and math in between three to 15 months of learning across grade levels. Additionally, a study that examined various interventions meant to improve academic achievement from students from low socioeconomic backgrounds found tutoring to be the most effective method, the summary states.

The literacy tutoring grants are one of two programs centered around tutoring established through LEARNS. The other is a high-impact tutoring program that offers grants to public school districts and open-enrollment public charters to administer high-impact tutoring programs in their schools.

The most recent of these, from researchers at Stanford University’s SCALE Initiative, examined math and reading tutoring programs in a large, urban district during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years. Neither led to overall gains in academic achievement.

But when researchers dug deeper into the data, they identified implementation problems that could be driving these null effects.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence around tutoring in a post-COVID landscape that suggests the effectiveness of a program hinges on the nitty-gritty details of how it is run—how often students meet with their tutors, for instance, or whether lessons are tailored to their specific needs.

Studying these implementation details could help school systems build more effective tutoring initiatives in the long run, said Elizabeth Huffaker, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida, and the lead author on the SCALE paper.