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Susanna Loeb, executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator, explained that the growth in spending on private tutoring is largely driven by wealthy families. This has contributed to wider educational gaps between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Loeb wrote that high-impact in-class tutoring is the most accessible and effective option. She added that it works best when it’s embedded in schools during the day, where a consistent tutoring session takes place for at least 30 minutes at a time and at a minimum of three days a week.

“The most effective way for parents to get free tutoring for their children is through their school,” Loeb wrote. “Students who attend tutoring as part of their regular school education either during or immediately before or after school are shown to have higher attendance rates, which leads to better outcomes, such as stronger math and reading achievement.”

Today, Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) announced a new round of grant and contract awards totaling more than $7 million to fund high-impact tutoring (HIT) programs for over 6,000 students across 90 DC Public Schools and public charter schools during the 2024-25 school year. This strategic investment includes $4.3 million in grants to 16 DC local education agencies (LEAs) and over $3 million in contracts with 11 qualified HIT providers and one strategic supports partner.  

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North Carolina Education Corps (NCEC) is a nonprofit working to accelerate student learning and strengthen communities by empowering caring adults to support students in data-informed ways. Currently, we are partnered with public school units across North Carolina to recruit caring adults form diverse backgrounds to become high-impact tutors employed by the public school unit. NCEC provides initial training, aligned with the science of reading and tutoring best practices. Our team of learning coaches extend that professional development through ongoing coaching support.

Cosmo provides premium online, 1:1 tutoring to students at all levels of learning and every demographic. Every student deserves the very best tutoring from the very best teaching professionals. Our tutors are US-based teaching professionals with degrees from top universities and a minimum of five years of teaching experience.

Each student receives a personalized learning plan customized by their Cosmo teacher meeting each student's individual learning goals, style, pace, interests and local school curriculum and standards.

Our program provides personalized, high-quality instruction to cohorts of 5-15 students, supported by two dedicated instructors. This approach ensures individualized attention, fosters collaborative learning, and promotes academic success in a supportive and inclusive environment. We serve students in middle school and high school for Mathematics, and we place a strong emphasis on helping students pass the New York State Algebra I exam, which are currently required for graduation in NYS.

Beyond Basics provides one-on-one, phonics-based literacy tutoring. We work with school staff to identify which students are in need of intervention. We then administer a diagnostic assessment that indicates where the student struggles with reading. They are then paired with a tutor who will work with them individually for the duration of the program. Our assessments allow the tutor to create personalized lesson plans geared toward the child's unique learning needs. The student and tutor meet five days per week, for an hour each day during school hours.

Edmentum’s award-winning K–12 virtual tutoring closes learning gaps and propels academic growth with program flexibility to target and support unique student needs. Our proven tutoring program is outlined in a research-based approach, enhancing learning outcomes and retention. Edmentum’s virtual tutoring supports the following outcomes:
• Provide vetted, qualified tutoring without straining campus resources
• Amplify academic and intervention programs with wraparound support
• Help more students reach academic milestones and achieve test success

Tutoring programs exploded in the last five years as states and school districts searched for ways to counter plummeting achievement during COVID. But the cost of providing supplemental instruction to tens of millions of students can be eye-watering, even as the results seem to taper off as programs serve more students.  

That’s where artificial intelligence could prove a decisive advantage. A report circulated in October by the National Student Support Accelerator found that an AI-powered tutoring assistant significantly improved the performance of hundreds of tutors by prompting them with new ways to explain concepts to students. With the help of the tool, dubbed Tutor CoPilot, students assigned to the weakest tutors began posting academic results nearly equal to those assigned to the strongest. And the cost to run the program was just $20 per pupil. 

The paper suggests that tutoring initiatives may successfully adapt to the challenges of cost and scale. Another hopeful piece of evidence appeared this spring, when Stanford University researchers found that a “small burst” program in Florida produced meaningful literacy gains for young learners through micro-interactions lasting just 5–7 minutes at a time. If the success of such models can be replicated, there’s a chance that the benefits of tutoring could be enjoyed by millions more students.

Student absenteeism surged during and after the pandemic, harming engagement and achievement. We evaluate the impact of Washington DC's High-Impact Tutoring (HIT) Initiative—designed to mitigate learning loss through targeted academic supports—on student absenteeism. Using daily attendance data and a within-student fixed effects design, we find that students were 1.2 percentage points less likely to be absent on days they were scheduled for tutoring, a 7.0% reduction.

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.

“It’s much more than just the dosage that makes the difference in this type of tutoring,” said Kathy Bendheim, the director of strategic advising for the National Student Support Accelerator, which studies tutoring models. “You do it with a consistent tutor, and it’s not homework help—it’s intentional instruction based on data about where that student is on their academic journey and what their specific instructional needs are.”

Generative AI, including Language Models (LMs), holds the promise to reshape key sectors like education, healthcare, and law, which rely heavily on skilled professionals to navigate complex responsibilities. In education, for instance, effective teacher training with expert feedback is crucial yet costly, limiting opportunities to enhance educational quality on a larger scale.

In-school tutoring is most effective, researchers say

When considering which programs to fund, Indiana should consider what research says about high-impact tutoring programs, said Nancy Waymack, director of research partnerships and policy for Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator, which provides resources for districts implementing tutoring programs.

High-impact tutoring is delivered one-on-one or in small groups by consistent and well-trained tutors. It happens during the school day up to five days a week, integrated with classroom instruction.

Indiana Learns requires parents to apply for the grant and then schedule and bring their children to lessons. The grant expanded in 2023 to allow tutoring during certain blocks of the school day, such as lunchtime, but it’s not clear how widespread that option is.

At the Critical Thinking Child (CTC), we provide tutoring and educational consulting for students, parents, and partners seeking to support children and young people in navigating academic success within our modern era of technology. We prepare students to engage in learning and think critically and deeply about our evolving world.

NOW! ProgramsⓇ is a provider of online, evidence-based literacy instruction designed to meet the diverse needs of K-12 students. For over a decade, we have delivered 1:1 and small-group instruction through our proprietary program, NOW! Foundations for Speech, Language, Reading, and SpellingⓇ, which is grounded in research funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). This research was rigorously vetted and ranks in the top 3% of the nation’s proposals for its proven impact on literacy development.

Presenter: Susanna Loeb, Professor of Education, Founder & Executive Director, National Student Support Accelerator, Stanford University

Pandemic-induced reductions in learning and school engagement, combined with substantial federal funding, led U.S. schools and school districts to develop a range of new programs for students, many of which were tutoring programs. Policy makers, in response, aimed to create conditions that would enable educators to design and implement these programs successfully. In this dynamic environment, a broad range of stakeholders needed to make decisions impacting students’ educational experiences. They looked for guidance from other states, districts and schools with prior tutoring experiences. While the research evidence on tutoring summarizing and analyzing these experiences was unusually strong, it almost exclusively focused on in-person tutoring with pre-pandemic technologies and instructional contexts. It also only lightly touched on the key issues of design and implementation. This fast-turnaround research project has aimed over the past four years to provide the range of decision makers with insights into effectiveness and implementation of tutoring programs to help them make real-time decisions, accelerate learning, and address the substantial inequities in access to quality educational experiences between demographic groups. In partnership with districts across the country, the project has produced insights about tutoring, while also highlighting both the advantages and disadvantages of conducting research during transition times to inform decisions across contexts. The project provides a model for considering the connections among decision makers and policy influencers looking to invest in and promote promising solutions, education leaders who are willing to try new things, refine, and learn, and researchers working quickly and in partnership to evaluate and provide insights.

High-impact tutoring has the strongest evidence base of any approach for improving student learning, and contributes to increased engagement and attendance. As far as proven education solutions go, it’s a pretty darn good one, and has rightfully been a bipartisan priority since the pandemic. 

But federal pandemic relief money that helped fuel the expansion of such programs dried up in September, and recent research has sparked debates about the high-impact tutoring’s effectiveness when implemented at scale. This includes an evaluation of Metro Nashville Public Schools’ tutoring program that reported small gains for students and a meta-analysis of large high-impact tutoring programs that showed challenges in maintaining evidence-based practices. 

An AI-powered tutoring assistant increased human tutors’ capacity to help students through math problems and improved students’ performance in math, according to a Stanford University study.

The digital tool, Tutor CoPilot, was created by Stanford researchers to guide tutors, especially novices, in their interactions with students.

The study is the first randomized controlled trial to examine a human-AI partnership in live tutoring, according to the researchers. The study examines whether the tool is effective for improving tutors’ skills and students’ math learning.

Proximity Learning has customizable tutoring options utilizing our Livestreamed (synchronous) certified teachers across all CORE subject areas and grade levels. Each learner will have the same tutor throughout the duration of the program. Tutors are intentionally trained on how to facilitate effective small group tutoring sessions, develop meaningful relationships with their learners, and progress monitor the academic growth per child. 

The Joseph Learning Lab is a 501c3 nonprofit founded in 2015. We have hybrid programs. After school tutoring for K-12, and summer enrichment sessions have been successful in getting underserved children caught up, post pandemic.

Team Tutor is an educational tutoring firm that provides personalized tutoring, test prep and study skills programs to students in grades K-12 through an online and in-person tutoring model. Over the past 20 years we have collaborated with schools to provide tutoring services for students through our many school programs.

Our program uses Huntington Learning Center academic programs, tailored for each student, to help students in grades 3-8 increase either their reading fluency and comprehension or their basic math skills. Teachers are assigned up to 4 students, who they then work daily as part of the master schedule at our partner schools. We have trained professionals come in from outside the school to achieve the teacher/student ratio required.

Live, Interactive Virtual Tutoring: BrightTreks offers live, real-time tutoring sessions with highly qualified educators. Our virtual environment allows for flexible scheduling while providing students with immediate feedback and support from their tutor. This dynamic approach ensures that students are actively engaged in every session, enabling deep learning and language acquisition.

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. 

Students whose tutors used Tutor CoPilot were 4 percentage points more likely to progress through math tutoring session assessments successfully compared to students whose tutors did not have AI assistance, the study found.

The approach particularly benefited lower-rated and less-experienced tutors, researchers said. Students of lower-rated tutors who used the AI assistance increased their math proficiency up to 9 percentage points on average compared to students learning from lower-rated tutors without AI assistance.

The study included 900 tutors and 1,800 elementary and secondary school students from a large school district in the South. Stanford partnered with tutoring company FEV Tutor to pilot the tool’s implementation.

Here’s how it works: A tutor presents a subtraction problem to a student. If the student answers incorrectly, the tutor can activate Tutor CoPilot, which will recommend that the tutor ask the student to identify the numbers in the problem or suggest the student draw the items that need to be subtracted. 

An AI-powered digital tutoring assistant designed by Stanford University researchers shows modest promise at improving students’ short-term performance in math, suggesting that the best use of artificial intelligence in virtual tutoring for now might be in supporting, not supplanting, human instructors.

The open-source tool, which researchers say other educators can recreate and integrate into their tutoring systems, made the human tutors slightly more effective. And the weakest tutors became nearly as effective as their more highly-rated peers, according to a study released Monday. 

Tutored by Teachers ("TbT"), a leading provider of personalized virtual instruction, has been awarded the prestigious Tutoring Program Design Badge from the National Student Support Accelerator ("NSSA"). This recognition highlights TbT's commitment to maintaining rigorous standards in tutor selection, program efficacy, and school partnerships. It also supports the company's ongoing expansion as TbT introduces new instructional supports designed to meet the evolving needs of diverse student populations.

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.