Continuous Improvement

In the past five years, the Texas district’s investments in staffing and high dosage tutoring are paying off.

That’s why the district piloted a virtual tutoring program in the 2020-21 school year. Middle school students were the first to participate. In spring 2021, the live virtual tutoring program expanded to serve 6,000 students in K-12, he said.

That same spring, Ector County ISD designated $10 million of its $93 million in federal pandemic relief funds to tutoring over the next three years, according to a report by university-based research nonprofits FutureEd and the National Student Support Accelerator.

At a White House event today, Domestic Policy Advisor Neera Tanden, in coordination with the U.S. Department of Education (Department), AmeriCorps, and the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University, will announce that the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS) has exceeded President Biden’s call to recruit an additional 250,000 adults into high-impact student roles by summer 2025 to support academic success for all students. These roles range from tutors, mentors, student success coaches, postsecondary transition coaches, and wraparound/integrated student support coordinators. As of the end of the 2023-2024 school year, an additional 320,000 adults have stepped into these roles in schools, exceeding the President’s goal and doing so a year early. 

You can’t argue with data. Research shows that high-dosage tutoring is one of the most effective ways to help students make academic progress. Yet few students actually receive it. A recent study from Stanford University demonstrated the many positive effects of tutoring, including increased reading and math scores, attendance and a feeling of belonging. Teach For America’s (TFA) tutoring program, the Ignite Fellowship, finds and develops tutors who connect virtually with students during the school day. Fellows, who are paid for their work, are supported by a school-based veteran educator to customize instruction. Seventy-one percent of the 3,500 students across the country being tutored by Ignite fellows meet their semester-long reading and math goals.

“This is most likely to happen if parents both want this and believe that they can get this – and deserve to get this – at school,” says Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Stanford University in California. 

Amid the flurry of activity in recent years, researchers and policy advocates are increasingly pointing to a specific kind of tutoring as the most effective. Known as “high-impact” or “high-dosage,” it generally refers to tutoring that happens at least three times a week for 30-minute sessions with groups of four or fewer students. And if it occurs during the regular school day? Even better.

The Bay Area Tutoring Association (BATA) is proud to host Silicon Valley High Dosage Tutoring Summit, a groundbreaking event designed to elevate the conversation on this critical academic intervention.

BATA is scheduled to host the Silicon Valley High Dosage Tutoring Summit on Friday October 11, 2024, at the Santa Clara County Office of Education. The summit will bring together various stakeholders including educators, policymakers, researchers, parent advocates, and funding organizations. Click here to register

The high-impact tutoring provider wins large district and state partnerships to address the literacy and numeracy crisis among K-8 students

Building on its success within New York City Public Schools, the largest school district in the country, Braintrust Tutors is now well-positioned to extend support to tens of thousands of high-risk students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Boston Public Schools, Detroit Public Schools Community District, and across the state of Tennessee.

I spent the past year visiting Jackson and eight other schools across three states and the District of Columbia to understand how and why their successful tutoring programs work and the challenges they’ve had to navigate. Our FutureEd study also included dozens of conversations with educators, school district leaders, providers, researchers and others who have turned to tutoring to combat learning loss after COVID.

Preliminary findings from research conducted by the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University provide evidence that high-impact tutoring has positive attendance benefits for DC students. The District is also seeing early signs of academic impact as well, with at-risk students who receive the appropriate amount of high-impact tutoring nearly 7% more likely to achieve their growth goals than at-risk students receiving less tutoring, according to interim assessment data.