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Varsity Tutors was founded in 2007 to help make high-quality tutoring from subject-matter expert tutors more accessible. Varsity Tutors for Schools was launched in 2021 to positively impact students through large-scale high-dosage tutoring models that are built for district-wide scale. The company has worked with more than 500 school districts to implement customized tutoring programs via timely, efficient, and efficacious implementations, with high-dosage tutoring programs administered based on the criteria established by EdResearch and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The goal of Math Motivators is to close the opportunity gap to, in turn, close the achievement gap by using a volunteer-driven math tutoring program that pairs underserved middle and high school students with professionals and college students with strong mathematics backgrounds.

During the two years that COVID-19 has upended school for millions of families, education leaders have increasingly touted one tool as a means of compensating for lost learning: personalized tutors. As a growing number of state and federal authorities pledge to make high-quality tutoring available to struggling students, a new study demonstrates positive, if modest, results from an experimental pilot that launched last spring. 

Research shows that tutoring, particularly high dosage tutoring where students receive multiple 30- to 60-minute sessions per week, is effective in helping students who have fallen behind, according to a report from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

When considering how schools can best support middle and high schoolers struggling with either the foundational skills of reading or reading comprehension, experts point to a research-backed strategy that can help close academic gaps: high-impact tutoring.

The term refers to an intensive form of tutoring that is offered through a school, is informed by data on individual students’ needs, aligns to classroom work, and can be effective in getting students to grade level faster. Yet few districts have been able to implement that kind of programming prior to the pandemic because of such challenges as cost and staff shortages. New federal relief funds are helping more districts explore the possibility.

Tutoring programs have become a leading strategy to address COVID-19 learning loss. What evidence-based principles can district and school leaders draw on to design, implement, measure, and improve high-quality tutoring programs? And what are districts who are piloting these programs learning about how to maintain fidelity to those principles, while also adapting to the specific needs of their contexts?

Consider Saga Education, the high-dosage math tutoring program we founded and lead. About 30 percent of our tutoring fellows – recent college graduates and seasoned professionals alike – have used their work with us as springboards to jobs in the classroom. Most arrive with no training or experience in education, only an aptitude for algebra and an eagerness to support students. After being embedded in a school for a year or more, many discover a passion for teaching they never knew they had.

Studies are few and mixed about the effectiveness of online versus in-person tutoring, but “many districts are struggling to recruit a sufficient number of tutors locally – especially those districts in rural areas or those that are focusing on higher-level or more technical courses such as calculus. While in-person tutoring may be preferred, for some locations and courses virtual is the best option,” Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and education professor, tells SmartBrief.

ThemeReads is designed to increase vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and background knowledge through brief, content-rich books meant to be read quickly and with understanding, allowing practice both with reading and with acquisition of specialized vocabulary and knowledge in content areas. ThemeReads texts focus around various content area themes, with multiple texts on each topic, providing more opportunity to practice reading content area words and synthesizing across texts to develop deeper knowledge in each topic.

Galaxy Math is a small-group systematic tutoring programs that teach students to identify, write, and count numbers, understand magnitude and place value, use <, >, and + signs. The programs provide instruction for students to become competent with efficient counting strategies to solve arithmetic problems by practicing skip counting by 10s, 5s, and 2s, identifying operations, writing addition and subtraction sentences, performing two-digit addition and subtraction, and identifying missing addends.

Carnegie Learning’s Virtual Mathematics Tutoring is an on-demand, virtual tutoring program. Our Directors of Professional Learning collaborate with district leaders to configure a tutoring offering that best fits their needs and their schedule. Our experts will own the overall tutor management, establish a weekly tutoring hours schedule, initiate an easy-to-use scheduling tool for students/parents, provide the live/video conferencing platform, manage the day-to-day support, and share the daily usage data with key stakeholders.

Virtual Mathematics Tutoring could include:

Our program teaches phonetic skills and learning strategies appropriate for all elementary reading programs. Each lesson plan provides step-by-step instructions allowing anyone, from classroom volunteers to reading teachers, to work with a student without preparation. Because of its accessibility, our reading curriculum fits well in any school reading group, one-to-one instruction, or community learning center.

Great Thinkers Learning Academy provides one on one tutoring via an online interactive platform K-12 for ELA, Maths, Science, Japanese, Spanish, French, and History. They also provide limited in-person tutoring. In addition, we offer small group tutoring and learning academies, which are interest-based learning opportunities for students to enjoy.

Great Thinkers Learning Academy learning pods are small group instruction for homeschool students. This allows students to interact with peers and to learn from an experienced teacher in supplement to their home-based education.

Schoolhouse.world offers free, virtual small-group tutoring sessions over Zoom in math, SAT, and AP preparation. All sessions are run by volunteer tutors who undergo a certification of content mastery and safety/quality training.

For more than 20 years, the JCC has trained and paired hundreds of volunteer tutors with academically vulnerable students in Manhattan's public schools through our Literacy and Math tutoring programs. Their
objective is to help raise elementary, middle, and high school students’ reading and math scores to grade level. The majority of students come from low-income households and under-resourced communities, including students living in low-income housing facilities and in domestic violence and homeless shelters.

Intutorly's volunteer tutors provide one-on-one tutoring to elementary and middle school students in need. All lessons are free of charge and offered online only at the student's convenience. Instruction is provided in a range of subjects, including reading, writing, math, science, and English as a second language. Students sign up by filling out a form on the website and then are matched with a tutor based on their individual educational needs and goals. Most tutors work with their students at least weekly for a minimum of 12 weeks.

Substantial new federal funds, such as those from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), are allowing districts to provide students with services such as tutoring that were not financially feasible in the past.

Are these new programs cost-effective enough to merit allocating other funds to sustain them, such as Title I and Title IV funding, after ARPA funding runs out in 2024?

High-dosage/low ratio tutoring has “consistently proven to accelerate achievement as quickly as possible” for all students regardless of their demographics, age, or whether they are from rural, suburban or urban areas, said Penny Schwinn, the state’s education commissioner. 

Indeed, research shows that tutoring programs that serve children in small groups with regular, frequent sessions can increase learning by up to 10 months, according to a synthesis of research by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

Relationships like that take time to develop. “It is often easier to train a tutor on content than it is to train a tutor on relationship-building and tutoring approach,” Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and education professor, tells SmartBrief, noting that content knowledge is more of a factor when working with upper-grade math students or multilingual students. 

Most states as well as the federal government have landed on tutoring as a key strategy to address unfinished learning from the pandemic.

Take math, for example. Studies have found that students lost more ground in math during the last school year than any other subject. Students and teachers desperately need support to combat fatigue and accelerate learning. How can schools implement effective math tutoring programs while balancing competing priorities in an ever-changing environment?

Millions of students, including those with disabilities, have experienced interrupted instruction due to school closures and shifts between remote and hybrid learning models. This webisode discussed the role that evidence-based tutoring programs can play within a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) to address a range of student needs and accelerate learning for all students and with an emphasis on students with disabilities. Jen Krajewski from ProvenTutoring and Dr.

Requires all DCPS schools to implement high-impact tutoring for students in need, reaching approximately 10% of all students.

Requires an accelerated learning committee to develop an IEP for every student who does not pass pass the STAAR test in grade 3, 5, or 8 in math or reading. Also, requires the assignment of a certified master, exemplary, or recognized teacher or participation in tutoring for any student who does not pass the STAAR test in grades 3–8 or STAAR (EOC) end-of-course assessments. Requirements are to begin in fall 2021 based on spring 2021 test results.

Tutoring must:

Creates TN Accelerating Literacy and Learning Corps, a matching grant opportunity to empower districts to implement or strengthen tutoring supports for students in low ratios and at a high dosage, with TN ALL Corps tutoring occurring for small groups of students in 30–45-minute sessions, two to three times per week. For every student tutored, the department will provide $700 per student per year, while a district contributes $800 per year per student. This amount covers at least 15% of district students in 1st – 8th grades in year one.

Partners with local schools to recruit, educate, and activate corps members to support students and accelerate learning through tutoring in NC's neediest districts. Corps members are paid a living wage by schools to work part-time as high-impact K-3 literacy tutors grounded in the science of reading and reading instruction. Corps members and school administrators benefit from a common recruitment and application process, training, and ongoing support provided by NCEC.