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Fresno Unified School District has made literacy a districtwide priority through its Every Child Is a Reader plan and its 2030 goals for early literacy and literacy intervention. Brainfuse has been named to the district’s qualified vendor pool for high-dosage literacy tutoring, making its virtual K–12 programs available for consideration through Fresno Unified’s purchasing process.
Fresno Unified aims to increase first-grade literacy proficiency from 48% in 2024 to 80% by 2030. The district has also set a goal of increasing the percentage of students in grades 3–8 who are more than one year behind in English language arts and achieving more than one year of growth. Brainfuse can work with participating programs to provide focused tutoring based on students’ current skill levels and the literacy priorities the district has already established.Even as students in Arkansas and across the nation struggle to recover from a "learning recession" that began more than a decade ago, a Stanford University researcher says parents should feel good about their children's access to quality tutoring.
Federal pandemic aid for schools dried up in the years following the initial COVID-19 outbreak, but many states have kept up tutoring efforts that were launched at the time, according to Nancy Waymack, director of partnerships and policy for the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford.
"As the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief dollars went away, we were concerned that tutoring might go away with them," Waymack said. "That wasn't really what we found."
Waymack, who grew up in Arkadelphia, is among the authors of a new snapshot report published Wednesday on tutoring policies in the United States. The report praises many states, including Arkansas, for maintaining strong investments in funding high-impact tutoring, implementation support and policy following the expiration of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, a pot of money Congress made available to states through a series of stimulus bills in 2020 and 2021.
The big story: Florida is one of 24 states, including Washington D.C., that currently funds K-12 tutoring directly, according to a new review published today by Stanford University.
The university’s third annual National Student Support Accelerator looks throughout the nation to analyze how states support high-impact tutoring and the policies and funding they have in place for it.
High-impact tutoring is an immersive form of tutoring based on relationship building and individualized instruction known to improve education outcomes and even school attendance, according to lead author of the brief Kathy Bendheim.
- | The 74
With tools like Amira and Khanmigo, ‘the take-up is very low,’ according to Stanford University’s Susanna Loeb.
Wendy Graham’s two kids first encountered Amira, a popular artificial intelligence tutoring platform, in 2025, during a summer reading program in New Mexico. She also used it at home with her daughter, now a fourth grader.
To help educators navigate the AI tutoring landscape, the National Student Support Accelerator and the AI Hub for Education at Stanford’s SCALE Initiative recently published a research brief examining the current research on the effectiveness of using AI in tutoring.
As schools deal with an uncertain funding environment, they might consider using AI tutoring to reduce costs, and “we wanted to make a more actionable tool for education system leaders on what the evidence says about AI tutoring,” said Chris Agnew, the director of the AI Hub for Education, which researches AI’s impact on student learning.
Part of the challenge with researching the effectiveness of AI tutoring is that the term could refer to a wide range of tutoring models, Agnew said.
- | The 74
Artificial intelligence-based tutoring programs promise something schools have long struggled to provide: personalized instruction for every student at a fraction of the cost of traditional 1-on-1 tutoring.
But for that promise to be fulfilled, students have to use the AI tools. New research suggests that may be much harder to achieve than schools assume.
In a paper describing the results of randomized controlled trials led by the Stanford SCALE Initiative, 355 students in grades 1 to 5 in two school districts were assigned either to use an AI literacy tutor independently or to use the same platform with support from a human tutor. In both, the goal was to improve reading achievement.
Intensive tutoring is supposed to be one of the most effective routes to raise student achievement. But it doesn’t always work out that way.
While meta-analyses of studies on high-dosage tutoring programs find big, positive impacts on learning, it’s often challenging for districts to implement these time- and labor-intensive initiatives in practice. Recent studies of post-pandemic tutoring programs have shown smaller-than-expected gains, or even no student improvement at all.
Could a lighter touch tutoring program be easier for schools to maintain, and still move the needle on student achievement? One new study suggests yes.
The paper comes from researchers at the National Student Support Accelerator, a program of the SCALE Initiative at Stanford University that studies high-impact tutoring. They tested a tutoring intervention called Chapter One, in which part-time tutors delivered 5-10 minute lessons throughout the school day, while students were still in their regular classrooms.
- | The 74
The end of Varsity Tutors for Schools follows the abrupt termination of another large provider, FEV Tutor, in early 2025 as relief funds dried up. But tutoring experts say this shutdown is not just another example of districts running out of extra federal money. In fact, multiple states, like Louisiana and Massachusetts, now provide ongoing funding for high-impact tutoring, including virtual models. With districts increasingly demanding strong results, Varsity Tutors for Schools, they say, wasn’t able to deliver proof that their services increased student performance.
For-profit providers, like Nerdy, have to answer to investors and shareholders. But regardless of the business model, those “that adhere closely to the research are going to be the ones that are more likely to have stronger outcomes,” said Kathy Bendheim, strategic advising director at the National Student Support Accelerator, a tutoring research center at Stanford University.
- | PRWeb
A collaboration between four national education organizations – the Partnership for Student Success, the New Jersey Tutoring Corps, the National Student Support Accelerator, and the Pathways Alliance – announced the official approval of the National Guideline Standards (NGS) for Tutor Apprenticeship Programs by the U.S. Department of Labor. This landmark approval provides a crucial new resource to strengthen educator pipelines through high-quality, workforce-aligned tutoring.
- | Forbes
High-impact tutoring (HIT), or high-dosage tutoring, is widely endorsed by educational leaders, advocates, and researchers to help improve outcomes for students. HIT is defined by several key components, all of which have been employed by Read Alliance since its inception (and long before the terminology of “high-impact tutoring” or “high-dosage tutoring” was defined and in use):
- Frequent (3+ times per week)
- Small group size (no more than four students per tutor, with one-to-one tutoring as the preferred model)
- Targeted instruction focused on specific skills or learning gaps, and designed to complement classroom instruction
- Led by trained instructors who receive ongoing support and oversight
- Consistent tutor-student relationship that fosters a strong connection over time
These components are largely attributed to Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA), in which Read Alliance (READ) is listed as a vetted provider which means the READ model meets their standards for excellence widely recognized as the “stamp of approval” for HIT programming.