News
Susanna Loeb has been appointed the inaugural Kissick Family Professor.
Loeb is the faculty director of the SCALE Initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which aims to develop and disseminate evidence-driven learning solutions, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Her research focuses on education policy and its role in improving educational opportunities for students, addressing issues including educator career choices and professional development, school finance and governance, and early childhood systems. She leads the Getting Down to Facts initiatives, which provide nonpartisan research and analysis to inform education policymaking in California.
- | FutureEd
What is the most important variable in high-impact tutoring?
The humans in the school building.
Not the platform. Not the model. Not the contract.
The human who makes sure a student gets to their session. The human who notices when the student isn’t progressing and asks why. The human who, on a Wednesday morning when everything else is pulling at them, still notices the quiet grimace of a student who doesn’t understand, and offers another way in.
- | The 74
There is a temptation in education to abandon projects rapidly and instead chase a new solution as a magic bullet for improving student outcomes. Too often, when an investment doesn’t have an instant payoff, it’s abandoned for the next shiny thing. New programs, new technology, new slogans, each promising to fix what came before it. But the truth is, no new solution will ever pay off without doing the hard, steady work of diagnosing problems and mastering the fundamentals.
In the post-COVID era, tutoring has faced criticism for mixed results following significant investments to address learning loss. This comes despite a significant body of research that shows high-dosage tutoring yields, on average, a learning gain of one-third of a grade level per year, with the potential for a full extra year of learning over three years.
- | EdSource
Called “Getting Down to Facts,” the research project comes at what Stanford education professor and project director Susanna Loeb calls “an inflection point” for California education. In a 40-page summary of 55 technical reports and 22 research briefs, Loeb writes that the findings arrive amid major shifts: the election of a new governor and state superintendent of instruction, the retreat of the federal government’s oversight and education-funding responsibilities, and the emergence of new technologies and their impact on the classroom and the workplace. Together, she said, these changes require the schools to respond to new conditions.
Getting Down to Facts is “designed to help Californians understand the condition of the state’s education system and the policy choices needed to improve it.
The District is also investing in what keeps students engaged. The Mayor’s proposed FY27 Grow DC budget expands access to high-impact tutoring, which is one of the most effective interventions for accelerating learning and re‑connecting students who have missed significant instructional time. Research from the National Student Support Accelerator has shown that middle school students receiving tutoring were 11.4% less likely to be absent on days they had scheduled tutoring sessions (equivalent of 3.1 more days of school). The budget also increases funding through a 2.55 percent boost to the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula and continues modernization of school facilities and expansion of career and technical education opportunities.
Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator’s review of tutoring research notes that alignment seems like it would be good practice but doesn’t have a strong research base. Jackson, research manager at the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, said she wanted to address that gap with a randomized controlled trial.
- | PR News
Stanford University Recognizes CTC's Tutoring Program Design
CTC has earned the Tutoring Program Design Badge from Stanford University's National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA)—awarded in 2025 following a rigorous, evidence-based review conducted by a third-party team of education leaders and experts. The Badge signifies the quality of CTC's tutoring program design and its alignment to Tutoring Quality Standards as assessed by researchers and practitioners. High-dosage virtual 1:1 tutoring programs analyzed in two university-led studies found significant gains for young students’ reading skills.
Dive Brief:
- Struggling readers in Missouri’s Kansas City Public Schools showed statistically significant gains in literacy outcomes when virtual high-impact tutoring was used within a multi-tiered system of support framework, a study from Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator found.
- Using 1:1 teacher-led virtual tutoring program in early literacy, the study analyzed data from 1,550 students across 14 elementary schools in grades 1-4. Students who scored “well below” grade level on benchmark assessments at the start of the 2024-25 school year particularly benefited.
- Participating students also saw significantly higher gains in annual typical growth (10.84 percentage points) and annual stretch growth (5.24 percentage points) on the i-Ready reading assessment.
...
- | EdSource
The high-dosage tutoring that Los Angeles Unified maintains it has been providing relies on money from the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP). The lawsuit, which includes other supports outlined in the settlement, gained final approval on Feb. 18 and is intended to help close learning gaps and improve academic performance.
The method specifically caters to students’ individual needs and provides either small group or one-on-one support that complements what they learn in the classroom, according to the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University.