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“Early literacy intervention makes all the difference, and through the LEARNS Act, literacy coaches, and high-impact tutoring, we’re building strong reading foundations from the start,” said Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “These awards recognize the work our educators are doing and the progress Arkansas is making to put students first. I’m grateful to President Trump and Secretary McMahon for their leadership in putting education back in the hands of states and communities so we can help every child read, learn, and thrive.”
The ADE has two major projects planned for the funding. The first project, in partnership with Air Reading, will be to evaluate high-impact tutoring initiatives at rural schools. It will also include an evaluation conducted by Stanford University to "assess impact and scalability."
- | PR News
BookNook, an ESSA Tier 1-rated provider of high-impact virtual tutoring for K–8 students, has been awarded the prestigious Tutoring Program Design Badge from the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University. This three-year designation recognizes BookNook's alignment with nationally endorsed Tutoring Quality Standards, affirming the strength and intentionality of its program design for both reading and math.
Susanna Loeb is named to the 2026 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, ranking the 200 university-based scholars in the United States who had the biggest impact on educational practice and policy last year.
High-impact tutoring has emerged as one form that researchers have shown actually works — when done well.
Stanford University researchers have found that high-impact tutoring works when it is embedded into the school day, happens at least three times per week in small groups, and matches the same tutors with students as much as possible. The Stanford researchers also found that tutoring is most effective when schools use data to identify students’ needs, and when tutoring materials align with research-backed and state standards.
High-impacting tutoring might also be implemented more widely in the district if students achieve substantial learning gains, as they have in schools across the country.
Research from the Stanford National Students Support accelerator shows that high-impact tutoring increased achievement by an average of three to 15 months of learning across grade levels. Also, the Annenberg Institute at Brown University found tutoring provides consistent and substantial gains on learning outcomes, particularly when the specific characteristics of high-impact tutoring and implemented.
Arkansas is not alone in providing funds to cover tutoring for struggling students. Among the dozens of other states with similar initiatives are such neighbors as Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, and farther flung states like Colorado, Rhode Island and Minnesota, according to the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University.
According to a research summary by the National Student Support Accelerator, tutoring can increase student achievement in reading and math in between three to 15 months of learning across grade levels. Additionally, a study that examined various interventions meant to improve academic achievement from students from low socioeconomic backgrounds found tutoring to be the most effective method, the summary states.
The literacy tutoring grants are one of two programs centered around tutoring established through LEARNS. The other is a high-impact tutoring program that offers grants to public school districts and open-enrollment public charters to administer high-impact tutoring programs in their schools.
- | FutureEd
A new study by Stanford researchers Hsiaolin Hsieh, David Gormley, Carly D. Robinson, and Susanna Loeb suggests why one-on-one tutoring has been found to produce double the gains in student learning than two-on-one tutoring.
Analyzing 16,629 transcripts from 2022-23 school year tutoring sessions from an earlier study that established the greater gains under one-on-one tutoring, the researchers examined how tutors allocated their time and attention across both one-on-one and two-on-one formats. The tutoring sessions focused on early literacy and served kindergarten through second grade students, with 510 students receiving one-on-one tutoring and 570 students receiving two-on-one tutoring. All students met with their tutor online for 20 minutes during the school day, four times per week.
The most recent of these, from researchers at Stanford University’s SCALE Initiative, examined math and reading tutoring programs in a large, urban district during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years. Neither led to overall gains in academic achievement.
But when researchers dug deeper into the data, they identified implementation problems that could be driving these null effects.
The findings add to a growing body of evidence around tutoring in a post-COVID landscape that suggests the effectiveness of a program hinges on the nitty-gritty details of how it is run—how often students meet with their tutors, for instance, or whether lessons are tailored to their specific needs.
Studying these implementation details could help school systems build more effective tutoring initiatives in the long run, said Elizabeth Huffaker, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida, and the lead author on the SCALE paper.
The case study examines how the New Jersey Tutoring Corps was established as a high-dosage tutoring initiative to help K-8 students recover from pandemic-era learning loss. It shows how the nonprofit built strong partnerships with districts, embedded tutors during the school day and after school, aligned instruction to state standards, and scaled rapidly across urban, suburban, and rural sites. For education leaders in districts, states, or nonprofits, the study offers practical insights into structuring and implementing a tutoring program with fidelity: how to design tutor-to-student ratios, schedule sessions, co-design with school partners, and build capacity for sustainability. It illustrates how evidence-informed models can be translated into actionable programming, and invites leaders to reflect on how they might adapt these lessons to their own contexts.
The report concludes that four years after the height of the pandemic, there is widespread use of evidence-based and people-powered student supports–such as high-intensity tutoring, mentoring, student success coaching, postsecondary transition coaching, and wraparound supports–in public schools across the United States. But, public school principals indicate that continued growth in these interventions is needed to meet the scale of student needs.
The report emphasizes that while implementation barriers exist to expanding evidence-based programs, there is a subset of schools that are proving that serving students at scale is possible, and outlines a range of resources and opportunities to support expansion of high-quality programs.