Tutor

In early 2024, initial reports indicated that tutoring might not only help kids catch up academically after the pandemic but could also combat chronic absenteeism. More recent research, however, suggests that prediction may have been overly optimistic.

Stanford University researchers have been studying Washington, D.C.’s $33 million investment in tutoring, which provided extra help to more than 5,000 of the district’s 100,000 students in 2022-23, the second year of a three-year tutoring initiative. When researchers looked at these students’ test scores, they found minimal to modest improvements in reading or math.

“We weren’t seeing a ton of big impacts on achievement,” said Monica Lee, one of the Stanford researchers. “But what we were seeing at that point in time were promising findings that the tutoring might be doing something for attendance.” 

Susanna Loeb, executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator, explained that the growth in spending on private tutoring is largely driven by wealthy families. This has contributed to wider educational gaps between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Loeb wrote that high-impact in-class tutoring is the most accessible and effective option. She added that it works best when it’s embedded in schools during the day, where a consistent tutoring session takes place for at least 30 minutes at a time and at a minimum of three days a week.

“The most effective way for parents to get free tutoring for their children is through their school,” Loeb wrote. “Students who attend tutoring as part of their regular school education either during or immediately before or after school are shown to have higher attendance rates, which leads to better outcomes, such as stronger math and reading achievement.”

Today, Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) announced a new round of grant and contract awards totaling more than $7 million to fund high-impact tutoring (HIT) programs for over 6,000 students across 90 DC Public Schools and public charter schools during the 2024-25 school year. This strategic investment includes $4.3 million in grants to 16 DC local education agencies (LEAs) and over $3 million in contracts with 11 qualified HIT providers and one strategic supports partner.  

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Tutoring programs exploded in the last five years as states and school districts searched for ways to counter plummeting achievement during COVID. But the cost of providing supplemental instruction to tens of millions of students can be eye-watering, even as the results seem to taper off as programs serve more students.  

That’s where artificial intelligence could prove a decisive advantage. A report circulated in October by the National Student Support Accelerator found that an AI-powered tutoring assistant significantly improved the performance of hundreds of tutors by prompting them with new ways to explain concepts to students. With the help of the tool, dubbed Tutor CoPilot, students assigned to the weakest tutors began posting academic results nearly equal to those assigned to the strongest. And the cost to run the program was just $20 per pupil. 

The paper suggests that tutoring initiatives may successfully adapt to the challenges of cost and scale. Another hopeful piece of evidence appeared this spring, when Stanford University researchers found that a “small burst” program in Florida produced meaningful literacy gains for young learners through micro-interactions lasting just 5–7 minutes at a time. If the success of such models can be replicated, there’s a chance that the benefits of tutoring could be enjoyed by millions more students.