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- | PRWeb
The Bay Area Tutoring Association (BATA) has been awarded the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) Tutoring Program Design Badge, a prestigious recognition for excellence in high-dosage tutoring program design and execution.
The Bay Area Tutoring Association (BATA) has been awarded the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) Tutoring Program Design Badge, a prestigious recognition for excellence in high-dosage tutoring program design and execution. This achievement highlights BATA's commitment to research-based, student-centered tutoring models that enhance academic success for underserved students
Tutoring has become a popular intervention for schools grappling with stagnant academic achievement.
A large body of evidence demonstrates that high-impact, high-dosage tutoring can effectively move the needle on student academic outcomes.
Now, a new study from Stanford University is adding to that body of research, finding that pairing girls with female math tutors increases the students’ STEM interest and improves their academic performance in math.
- | FutureEd
In recent years, state education agencies have pursued a range of strategies to scale and sustain tutoring: awarding competitive grants or allocating formula funds, developing approved provider lists, offering technical assistance, and partnering with higher education institutions to recruit and train tutors. States such as Arkansas (Tutoring Corps), Colorado (High-Impact Tutoring Program), and Louisiana (Accelerate) have established statewide frameworks designed to reach large numbers of students, reflecting a broader shift toward embedding tutoring within state education systems to promote consistency, quality, and long-term sustainability. Many of these efforts focus on “high-impact” or “high-dosage” tutoring that research says gets the best results―programs with four or fewer students working with the same tutor for at least 30 minutes per session, three times a week, over several months.
Yet while a few states have committed to funding beyond federal relief dollars, most continue to rely on temporary appropriations. According to the National Student Support Accelerator, Tennessee remains the only state to incorporate “high-impact” tutoring into its permanent K–12 funding formula. Others, such as Louisiana, Virginia, Michigan, and Maryland, have supported tutoring through one-time legislative appropriations or short-term formula funding, much of which is set to expire in the next few years. For example, Colorado’s five-year program will conclude in 2026, and Virginia’s funding for its ALL In Tutoring initiative is also scheduled to end that year.
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.
- | EdSource
“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.
“By focusing on quality standards and building supports for evidence-based programs, we are creating accessible and well-supported pathways to build effective career-connected experiences,” added Kathy Bendheim, Director of Strategic Advising for the National Student Support Accelerator.
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.