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With the return to in-person learning in sight, K-12 leaders are urgently setting priorities for the coming school year. Each spring, educators are eager to find that “just right” approach to their biggest challenges. As a former middle and high school principal, I know that’s especially true after a tough year—and no year has been tougher than this one.

For many leaders, accelerating student learning is top-of-mind, and one method that has garnered a lot of recent attention is high-impact tutoring. The National Student Support Accelerator, founded this year at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University to promote and support high-impact tutoring, defines it as one-to-one or small-group support that supplements classroom learning and complements existing curriculum by focusing on specific goals in response to individual students’ needs. This kind of tutoring is also known as “high-intensity tutoring” or “high-dosage tutoring.”

The Annenberg Institute received a $999,260 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation last month to fund the National Student Support Accelerator. The NSSA research aims to strengthen and grow high-impact tutoring programs and opportunities for K-12 students nationwide. This funding will support the project for two years.

The new National Student Support Accelerator, housed at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, launched to accelerate the growth of high-impact tutoring opportunities for K–12 students in need. The accelerator coordinates and synthesizes tutoring research and uses that research to develop publicly available tools and technical assistance to support districts and schools to develop high-impact tutoring programs for students.

“This is a big infrastructure commitment,” Little said. “Dallas ISD — and no district really — has tried to have that many tutors come in a short amount of time. We’re going to have to be really creative and exhaustive in exploring every avenue to source tutors.”

DISD will partner with Brown University’s National Student Support Accelerator, Little said, as it moves forward. The initiative works to create effective, research-based tutoring programs across the country.

The National Student Success Accelerator’s mission is to expand high-impact tutoring opportunities for all K-12 students in need. The NSSA is a research-based field-building organization that seeks to drive scaling and continual improvement in the quality of tutoring.

The NSSA began with a group of educators convening around the issue of COVID-19 learning loss and the potential of tutoring as a solution. We are currently seeking to hire our founding Executive Director to further lead the organization through its initial organizational development and launching its initial set of programs and services.

Saga Education, the national nonprofit behind one of the most studied personalized tutoring programs in the country, today announced the launch of Saga Coach, a free, self-paced online training portal that covers the essential components of effective tutoring. The training is based on Saga's experience as a proven implementer of high-dosage, high-impact tutoring programs serving thousands of students in major U.S. school districts like Chicago, New York City, Washington, D.C. and Broward County, Fla. 

“There is a lot of evidence that tutoring can produce large learning gains for a wide range of students, especially students who have fallen behind,” says Carly Robinson, a postdoctoral research associate at the institute. “Tutoring raised to the top of the list of what could put a dent in unprecedented learning loss. Tutoring works.”

The institute quickly developed the National Student Support Accelerator, still in its startup phase, to bring together researchers, schools and donors to help give K-12 students nationwide access to tutoring. Robinson says the goal is to make tutoring effective and then implement that effectiveness at scale.

Done well, high-impact tutoring can help individual students accelerate their learning and increase their engagement with school, said Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and a panelist. But designed poorly, tutoring can be ineffective, she said.

As momentum grows to build high-quality tutoring opportunities into the school day, and as more federal stimulus funding for student learning becomes available, districts should consider tutoring initiatives, Loeb said. “This may be the best opportunity we'll have to get this proven intervention built into schools for the long run, to provide all students in need with the high-impact tutoring to supplement their classroom work,” she said.

High-Impact tutoring — i.e., tutoring delivered three or more times a week by consistent, trained tutors using quality materials and data to inform instruction — is one of the most effective academic interventions, providing an average of more than four months of additional learning in elementary literacy and almost 10 months in high school math, according to research from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University (learn more here). The National Student Support Accelerator offers open-source Accelerator tools and resources to help ensure more equitable access to quality tutoring. These research-backed tools and supports are easy to use and downloadable, and are designed to make structuring, implementing and scaling high-quality, high-impact tutoring programs as straightforward as possible.