High-Dosage Tutoring and Reading Achievement: Evidence from New York City

This study examines the impact on student achievement of high-dosage reading tutoring for middle school students in New York City public schools, using a school-level randomized field experiment. Across 3 years, schools offered at least 130 hours of four-on-one tutoring based on a guided reading model. At the mean, tutoring had a positive and significant effect on school attendance, a positive but insignificant effect on English language arts (ELA) state test scores, and no effect on math state test scores. For black students, our treatment increased attendance by 2.0 percentage points and ELA scores by 0.09 standard deviations per year.