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“Portland is probably doing the right thing by starting small and getting it right,” Loeb said. “Using your own teachers can be effective and easier to implement since the teachers are well versed in what the students should be learning and they likely already know the students.”

Critically, though, structuring the program this way could limit the district’s ability to scale it up, Loeb added. That’s a particular concern given the millions of dollars in federal pandemic relief money that has to be spent or returned by September 2024.

With “proper supports, such as good materials and coaching, they can be excellent tutors,” said Stanford professor Susanna Loeb, who founded the National Student Support Accelerator to expand access to high-quality tutoring.

The content and design of this Resource Library draws on insights from interviews with tutoring program directors, teachers, math directors, STEM directors and other math leaders, as well as from a literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles on math teaching, tutoring, and equitable teaching practices. 

The goal of this guide is to provide resources to help tutoring programs provide effective math tutoring for students in need.

This Playbook aims to support HEIs in partnering with school districts to offer high-impact tutoring services. While HEI staff members are the primary audience, state educational officials, school district staff, and school administrators can leverage many of the resources in the Playbook. 

Are you a college or university leader looking to improve opportunities for your students?

Or maybe you are a district leader looking to partner with a college or university to provide tutoring for your students?

The National Student Support Accelerator’s High Impact Tutoring: Higher Education Institution Playbook supports higher education institutions in partnering with school districts to offer high-impact tutoring services.

Having partnered with multiple state, university and district-led community-tutoring programs, Pearl is developing the nation’s most diverse dataset in the tutoring industry. The platform is foundational for managing and scaling hybrid tutoring through evidence-based best practices and collaborates with the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and its National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) to safely gather data to continuously improve program design and measurably accelerate student outcomes.

“Tutoring is one of the most promising approaches for accelerating student learning and reducing educational disparities,” according to a working paper of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

However, there is still little data on which programs are most effective, studies show.

Even when tutoring is available, struggling students are far less likely to opt in than their more-engaged and higher-achieving peers, the Annenberg paper also found.

Program Design

Adapt this document to advocate for your HEI’s support of a high-impact tutoring partnership with a local K-12 district.

What is High-Impact Tutoring and how do higher education institutions partner with school districts?

The purpose of this guidance is to provide HEIs with ideas for how to recruit university students to serve as tutors. These ideas are curated from current practices shared by HEI tutoring programs in local K-12 districts. Depending on the population of students you intend to recruit, some of these ideas may be more relevant to your context than others. 

Recommended Division of Functions Across HEI Departments

Aligned to TQIS Quality Standards 

The purpose of this guidance is to provide HEI partners with ideas for how to engage K-12 students more broadly with the HEI community.  This list is curated from practices shared by current HEI tutoring programs in local K-12 districts.  Depending on the design of your program and your HEI campus, some of these ideas may be more relevant to your context than others. 

Once the partnership between the HEI and K-12 schools is established, regular meetings between the HEI and K-12 schools ensure that the partnership remains healthy and improves over time.

The purpose of this guidance is to provide HEIs seeking opportunities to partner with a school district with information about how to identify districts interested in and/or already offering tutoring services.

Use these ten multiple-choice questions to design your tutoring program’s Model Dimensions. Model Dimensions are the specific design choices a new tutoring program makes at the outset. Each choice you make should have a clear rationale supported by your Landscape Analysis and be made in consultation with your school district partner and internal task force/team. 

This document outlines costs and funding sources needed to develop and/or grow a tutoring partnership between your HEI and a local K-12 school district. The amount and type of funding needed will be based on the model of your tutoring program. Use this cost calculator and HEI-specific budgeting template to understand your projected costs.

Provides a $28 million grant to extend the New York Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness Program (NY GEAR UP). This grant has been awarded to New York for four consecutive years and has served more than 6,200 students. The program supports students in low-income communities with tutoring, college and career advisement, mentoring, and college-related services from 7th grade through their college freshman year. The grant will be housed in colleges and universities across New York State and will be responsible for recruiting, hiring, and training college students to serve as tutors.

Launches the New Mexico Math Tutoring Corps in January of 2023. The statewide tutoring initiative provides math tutoring for 8th-12th grade students with a significant focus on Algebra 1. Virtual tutoring includes a 1:5 tutor to student ratio for 45 minute sessions, three days a week. The New Mexico State Department of Education will be responsible for the hiring, onboarding, and training of eligible tutors. A portion of training consists of a review of the SAGA curriculum that is implemented in sessions.

Proposes the establishment of the High Efficiency Accelerated Learning (HEAL) Grant Program and the Tutoring Advisory Commission. HEAL is intended to provide high-impact tutoring opportunities to students around the state in order to mitigate the effect of learning loss or interrupted learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Tutoring Advisory Commission is responsible for overseeing the development, implementation, and evaluation of the HEAL program.

Our program serves grade 6 - 12 students who:

• Have significant learning gaps or need acceleration in core subjects
• Are in danger of falling behind on meeting academic standards
• Need a confidence boost

How do lessons work?