Tutoring Organization

“We have a lot of work to do,” Hudson said, which is why the 43,500-student district has zeroed in on providing high-impact tutoring.

Joined by Stanford University’s Nancy Waymack, Soto and Hudson shared what Portland has learned from its efforts during a July 12 session at UNITED, the National Conference on School Leadership.

High-impact tutoring is a data-driven service that is embedded into the school day and uses consistent, well-supported tutors, said Waymack, director of research, partnerships and policy for Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator. The tutors use high-quality instructional materials and hold sessions at least three times a week in small groups of no more than four students, she said. 

FEV Tutor further evolved last year when it announced a new AI-enhanced platform, Tutor CoPilot. The tool makes tutors more effective by giving them guiding questions to ask students. In a randomized trial, the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University, which studies tutoring models, found that when less-experienced tutors used the AI support, student math scores increased an average of 9 percentage points. 

Over the past couple of years, scaling well-researched solutions has been shown to also counter the negative effects of the pandemic, Loeb said, from widening achievement gaps and missed school time, to poorer social and emotional development. Her team recently launched the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) to address educational inequities resulting from the pandemic. NSSA conducts research on the most promising tutoring practices and works with district leaders and others to provide research-backed guidance on implementing high-impact tutoring. 

“Our students deserve this work,” Loeb said. “From our research, we learn so much about how to engage students and accelerate their learning. The practical, easy-to-use learnings from research need to reach decision makers so that our students can benefit.”

Tips by Text and NSSA are part of SCALE, Loeb’s new initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, a university-wide effort addressing some of the most challenging issues in education through research, partnerships, and technological innovation. 

Oakland REACH and district staff trained tutors based on the National Student Support Accelerator’s high-impact tutoring program, which requires weekly small-group support, close monitoring of student progress, alignment with district curriculum and oversight by school staff.

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.”