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Alan Safran is the CEO and co-founder of Saga Education, which helps states and districts with tutoring best practices. Susanna Loeb is the founder and executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University and a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

American parents care deeply about their local schools and are committed to improving education. That’s because Americans know that education plays a crucial role in shaping our children’s future. So the ultimate question is not “should we improve public schools” but “how”?

While the news headlines about the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress felt grim, bright spots bucked the national trends in exciting and promising ways and beg for our attention. These bright spots point us in the right direction, if we’re willing to learn from them.

“Lots of other states have helped push tutoring along more than California has. I’m really optimistic that in some ways, it (California) can be a leader, because we’ve learned so much that they could really do it more effectively immediately than we could right at the beginning,” said Susanna Loeb, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education as well as the founder and executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator. 

Loeb sees an opportunity for California to jump-start the state’s laggard performance on state and national achievement assessments, especially in early literacy, by creating a second or “Western” wave of tutoring.

The Badge was awarded following an extensive evaluation by a third-party team of education leaders, who assessed the alignment of Tutor.com's High-Dosage Tutoring program with rigorous Tutoring Quality Standards. The Badge is intended to serve as a first filter to states and K–12 districts to indicate that the program has high-quality, research-aligned design.

"We are honored to be recognized with the NSSA Tutoring Design Program Badge," said John Calvello, Chief Institutional Officer at Tutor.com and The Princeton Review. "We place the student at the center of all we do. To that end, we designed a research-backed program to help students achieve and exceed grade-level proficiency—and we are thrilled about the results. It's clear that our High-Dosage Tutoring is having a significant positive impact on accelerating student learning and closing achievement gaps."

In the library of Hiawatha Elementary School, students use crayons to connect points on a graph. They don’t know it yet, but they’re drawing a big pirate ship.

“We are pirating, not in the illegal way. We're pirating in the fun math way," jokes Lily Smith, the third-grade teacher running the activity. It’s part of their “Crazy Eights” after-school math program, where they’re trying to make math more fun.

They’re pirates learning about X & Y axes today. On Tuesday, they were cow farmers learning perimeter and area.

Pandemic-era disruptions to education resulted in an unprecedented influx of federal funds to K–12 schools, some of which was used to address lost student learning. Summer school, one-to-one technology, academic enrichment, and virtual resources were among the myriad remedies deployed, but none was thought to hold more promise than tutoring. Studies indicate far less positive impact than hoped for from tutoring, particularly for those students who fell furthest behind. What happened? A new report from the journal Educational Researcher digs into one charter network’s implementation efforts and finds evidence that could explain the problem.

A trio of California-based researchers partnered with Aspire Public Schools, a large network of charter schools in the state with locations in the Bay Area, the Central Valley, and Los Angeles. At the start of the spring semester of 2021, all 7,000 Aspire middle and high school students received personal electronic devices and free access to an unnamed on-demand virtual tutoring platform covering content in core academic subjects. The service was available 24/7, but the research team doesn’t delve into details on when students used it other than to say they are aware of instances where it was incorporated into classroom time. In other words, this is not a study of embedded versus non-embedded tutoring.

PITTSBURGH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Carnegie Learning today announced the company has been awarded the prestigious Tutoring Program Design Badge from Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator ("NSSA") for the company’s high-impact tutoring program. To date, the tutoring program has experienced substantial growth, providing over 259,000 tutoring sessions to more than 30,000 students. These sessions, led by over 1,000 certified tutors, have resulted in an average 76.62% growth in student scores from pre-to post-test assessments and an average 119% growth in one school district.

High-dosage tutoring is uniquely effective in helping students learn, including when implemented at scale. A recent analysis by University of Virginia researcher Beth Schueler, along with Brown University’s Matthew A. Kraft and Grace T. Falken, analyzed 282 randomized control trials and found that large-scale tutoring programs yield months of additional student learning per year, though effectiveness diminished as programs scale beyond 1,000 students. Yet even large-scale tutoring results were stronger than educational interventions like summer school, class size reduction, and extended school days. Additionally, recent studies of individual tutoring programs continue to find strong positive effects on students, even in challenging learning conditions. 

A high impact tutoring initiative in Washington, D.C., showed promise for middle schoolers and those with extreme absenteeism, a new report finds.

Dive Brief:

• One-to-one tutoring can lower absenteeism rates by fostering student-teacher relationships and a sense of belonging, making students more willing to go to school, a recent report from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University found.
• The study looked at the High-Impact Tutoring Initiative launched in 2021 to provide math and reading tutoring across 141 Washington, D.C., public K-12 schools — with the greatest focus on serving at-risk students.
• The positive effects were particularly strong for middle school students and students with extreme absenteeism rates in the prior year, who were 13.7% and 7% less likely, respectively, to be absent when tutoring sessions were scheduled, the study found.