Tutoring Organization

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.” 

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.

In the past five years, the Texas district’s investments in staffing and high dosage tutoring are paying off.

That’s why the district piloted a virtual tutoring program in the 2020-21 school year. Middle school students were the first to participate. In spring 2021, the live virtual tutoring program expanded to serve 6,000 students in K-12, he said.

That same spring, Ector County ISD designated $10 million of its $93 million in federal pandemic relief funds to tutoring over the next three years, according to a report by university-based research nonprofits FutureEd and the National Student Support Accelerator.

“It’s much more than just the dosage that makes the difference in this type of tutoring,” said Kathy Bendheim, the director of strategic advising for the National Student Support Accelerator, which studies tutoring models. “You do it with a consistent tutor, and it’s not homework help—it’s intentional instruction based on data about where that student is on their academic journey and what their specific instructional needs are.”