As U.S. public schools emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, longtime education policy wonk Liz Cohen saw that in many places, educators were finally taking tutoring seriously.
For a year and a half in 2023 and 2024, Cohen traversed the country, interviewing educators, researchers and policymakers and observing tutoring sessions in seven states and the District of Columbia.
Now the vice president of policy for the education group 50CAN, Cohen shares her findings in a new book, out today from Harvard Education Press: The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives.
She explores “the accidental experiment” that took place across American schools starting in 2020, as researchers figured out the principles of what was originally called “high-dosage tutoring” but has come to be known as “high-impact tutoring.”
Its four pillars, according to Stanford’s National Student Support Accelerator:
- It must take place at least three days a week.
- Sessions last at least 30 minutes.
- Sessions are with a consistent tutor.
- There are no more than four students working in a group.
The moment couldn’t have been more tailor-made for such a comprehensive intervention. In the course of just a few months, federal aid to K–12 schools more than tripled, with districts slated to get at least 90% of the new funding. Federal rules eventually dictated that they reserve at least 20% of the largest pot of money to treat pandemic-related learning loss. Tutoring, Cohen writes, “quickly became the watchword of how learning loss should be addressed.”
Cohen interviewed everyone from Stanford scholar Susanna Loeb, whose research helped lay the groundwork for the movement, to Katreena Shelby, a Washington, D.C., middle school principal who somehow found a way to get a tutor for every student in her school.
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