Over $120 billion in federal were expiring, leaving school leaders and tutoring providers uncertain whether programs would continue. The incoming administration was focused on slashing Department of Education spending, not issuing new grants. 

“We didn’t know if this administration would put anything into education,” said Loeb, a Stanford University professor who . “We were worried that all of the experimentation that had been going on and that access to tutoring would drop precipitously.” 

That didn’t happen.

When researchers, district leaders and tutoring providers convened earlier this month in Washington, it was clear that worries over tutoring being nothing more than a pandemic fad had turned to optimism. A growing number of states expect districts to integrate tutoring into the school day and have committed funding and staff to make it happen. Several require tutoring for students scoring below grade level and are vetting providers so districts don’t have to. And in a recent round of literacy , totaling $256 million, federal education officials signaled that access to tutoring should be a fixture in the nation’s schools. 

“High-dosage tutoring has evolved from a concept into a proven, evidence-based strategy and then into a reality for thousands of students in thousands of schools,” Kirsten Baesler, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, told attendees at the annual Accelerate conference. “It is a foundational strategy for improving student outcomes.” 

Even before the new federal grants were announced, a by Loeb’s team showed that nearly half of all states either offer tutoring grants or use their school finance formula to help districts pay for programs. 

Arkansas, which she described as “strategic and ambitious,” is one example. Its 2023 LEARNS Act created two tutoring programs.

One provides grants to . To measure the return on investment, the state’s now flags whether a student receives tutoring during the school day.

“If policymakers want results, they have to invest in the structures to get those results,” Amy Counts, director of curriculum projects at the state education agency, said during one of the Accelerate sessions. 

Another Arkansas initiative up to $1,500 to spend on tutoring if their children don’t meet reading standards. Initially, teachers weren’t fond of the idea that families received the extra money instead of schools.

“They didn’t push the program because of that. But we said, ‘If you help parents use that program, that benefits you,’ ” Counts said. The other challenge, she said. was that some parents of struggling readers wouldn’t spend the money “because they’ve never had to engage in securing services for their child.”

To Accelerate President Nakia Towns, the federal grants represent an important shift. 

“Look Mama, we made it,” she told attendees.

Accelerate received one of those 24 grants to work with the Oklahoma State Department of Education. They’ll test how factors like group size, the frequency of sessions and whether tutoring is delivered virtually or in person affects results. 

Seven of the awards went directly to state education agencies that are working to scale up tutoring programs, especially in rural areas. Loeb’s team, for example, will evaluate Arkansas’ efforts to , a virtual program. The study will also compare results when tutors are college students versus trained educators.

‘Important step forward’

Accelerate has launched some of that state-level activity through its , and this legislative session, CEO Kevin Huffman is tracking 12 tutoring-related bills in eight states. They include:

• A that would require high-impact tutoring for students with a reading or math “deficiency.”

• A to establish a competitive grant program for tutoring.

• An that would require for students scoring at the lowest levels in math and reading. The Senate passed the bill, but it’s still pending before a House education committee.

• A that would expand an existing program for elementary students through eighth grade.

“All of this feels like an important step forward,” Huffman told ����Ӱ��. At the conference, he said “momentum is different” because states aren’t supporting tutoring just because they have one-time federal dollars to spend.

One policy expert recently questioned whether tutoring has produced “too little bang for too much buck.” In , Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said he hasn’t been able to “muster much enthusiasm” for tutoring and suggested that it has been an insufficient way to address the “disastrous aftermath of COVID-era school closures.”

Loeb agreed that while pandemic relief funds allowed states and districts to test different models, those early examples didn’t always produce gains. Some states and districts moved too fast, and implementation challenges, like infrequent sessions and high turnover of tutors, hindered students’ progress. Research shows that a mismatch between the material tutors cover and the curriculum in students’ regular classes can also contribute to poor results.

“Some of it worked, and some of it didn’t,” Loeb said. 

But during this month’s event, Antoinette Mitchell, state superintendent for the District of Columbia, said investments in tutoring have paid off. Her office, which oversees both the District of Columbia Public Schools and charters, contracts with CitySchools Collaborative, a nonprofit, to manage tutoring logistics. It handles scheduling and finds space for tutoring sessions so principals don’t have to. 

, more than 42% of DCPS students scored at the highest levels in reading, exceeding pre-pandemic results. In math, the percentage of students meeting expectations grew by over 4 percentage points, the largest jump since 2015. With one of the federal grants, CitySchools Collaborative will expand its work into Maryland and Virginia. 

More recent research findings, about the importance of offering tutoring and , have also allowed districts to learn from past mistakes. 

“You can actually do this at a decent scale,” Loeb said, “and give students this personalized attention.”

That’s when a large suburban school district in Texas, flush with COVID relief funds, signed a contract with a virtual tutoring provider to deliver extra help to students in 28 schools who had fallen below grade level. Research showed that could produce significant gains for students and was far more effective than on-demand models.

But the district’s program , according to a recent study from Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator, which focuses on studying and expanding effective tutoring. Students even lost ground in reading and would have been better off with “business-as-usual” support, like small group instruction or using a computer program for extra practice. 

Experts view the findings as a cautionary tale of how tutoring can go wrong.

The district had to wait on background checks for tutors, many students were still chronically absent and the tutoring sessions often conflicted with other lessons or special events. As a result, students didn’t receive the 30 hours or more required under a mandating tutoring for those who failed the annual state test. Instead of five days a week as planned, 81% of the students attended tutoring three or fewer days, and most students worked with a different tutor every time they attended a session.

The findings reinforce the importance of protecting the time students are supposed to receive tutoring, said Elizabeth Huffaker, an assistant professor of education at the University of Florida and the lead author of the study.

High-dosage models — featuring individualized sessions held at least three times a week with the same, well-trained tutor — can still “drive really significant learning gains,” she said, “but in the field, things are always a little bit more complicated.”

For parents, the Stanford study can help explain why children might not make gains, even when their district offers extra help, said Maribel Gardea, executive director of MindShiftED, a nonprofit advocacy group and network of about 5,000 parents in the San Antonio area. Despite the billions states received in relief funds, many students still haven’t reached pre-pandemic levels of performance.

“We knew that high-dosage tutoring was one of those things that was proven,” Gardea said.  “There was research, but we never saw those results.”

She urges districts to include parent groups like hers in planning tutoring and choosing providers. But she added that too many parents are unaware their children are behind, much less equipped to judge whether a program is set up for success. 

“The trust has been lost for such a long time,” she said. “Parents just send their kids to school and they hope for the best.” 

‘It’s logistics’

The results add to a growing body of research at a time when tutoring has shifted from being viewed as an emergency stopgap to an ongoing teaching strategy, according to released last week from Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting organization. 

The authors’ interviews with state and local education leaders, researchers and tutoring providers showed that while many schools lean toward in-person tutors, “effective virtual models persist” in many districts. Going forward, they expect more schools to use tutoring as a pipeline for recruiting and training new teachers.

Districts have learned a lot about tutoring since that first, full year back after school closures, one in which districts saw staff shortages, record levels of absenteeism and disruptive behavior from students. have passed legislation to support tutoring or provide at least some short-term funding to keep programs running now that federal relief funds have expired. Some districts, including , are designing contracts that reward tutoring providers with more money when students pass tests or make other significant gains.

Recent shows an increase since December 2022 in the share of schools offering high-dosage tutoring, from 37% to 42% — especially in the South. But the results of the study show that just giving tutoring a high-dosage label doesn’t mean students will receive the help they need.

“It’s logistics,” said T. Nakia Towns, chief operating officer at Accelerate, which funds research on tutoring and other recovery efforts. “You have to have the scheduling. You have to have the identification of the students.”

High mobility, absenteeism

To encourage the tutoring provider and the Texas district to participate in the study, the researchers didn’t identify them. But an official with the district, who spoke on background, told ����Ӱ�� that one reason tutoring didn’t start until the middle of the school year was because leaders waited for winter test data to ensure they were selecting students who needed the most help.

The state required tutors to pass federal background checks, a process that added delays, and it took time to find bilingual tutors and those with special education experience. Students who were furthest behind academically “were also the same students who had high mobility or high absentee rates,” the official said. 

School assemblies interfered with the tutoring schedule, and some principals, the official said, were less supportive of virtual tutoring in general. Now, he said, the district offers in-person afterschool tutoring as one option, but also builds intervention time into the school day for all students.

Tutoring during school hours increases the chances that students will actually get the service, but the model creates some challenges, Huffaker said. Tutoring is now “competing with other instructional practices during the school day.” 

That includes lessons that teachers are presenting to the whole class and don’t want students to miss, the district official added.

Recent findings from another tutoring study, the , provides further proof that the more tutoring students receive, the greater their gains. But the “bad news,” according to the researchers, from the University of Chicago and MDRC, was that students often didn’t receive as much tutoring as originally planned.

“Conversations with the operators suggest schools felt they simply had too many competing demands on limited instructional time,” the authors wrote.

Another takeaway from the Stanford study is the “critical role” of relationships between tutors and students, said Rahul Kalita, co-founder of Tutored by Teachers, a virtual provider with a network of over 6,800 certified teachers. In the , one of its largest clients, students are approaching pre-pandemic levels in reading, and nearly 70% of third graders passed a reading test this year required for promotion to fourth grade. 

Without “consistent, human-to-human connection,” Kalita said, results will be similar to on-demand “edtech tools” that researchers have found to be ineffective.

‘Start with the curriculum’

Not only did Texas students not receive enough tutoring, the research team found a weak relationship between their sessions and the material they needed to know for tests. Tutors covered about a third of the math standards and only about half that in reading. 

But this is an area where some tutoring companies have shown improvement, said Towns, with Accelerate. More successful providers, she said, “really start with the curriculum,” and hire experts with “deep knowledge around literacy or math.” 

now show that remote tutoring can be just as effective as in-person programs. That’s why she encouraged districts not to give up on virtual models.

“Coming out of the pandemic,” she said, “everybody was just like, ‘Let’s try anything. Anything is better than nothing,’ and in fact that’s not true.” 

Armed with $190 billion in COVID-19 recovery funds from the federal government, nearly every state spent at least some of it on tutoring, with more than half adopting standards to ensure districts and schools used high-dosage, high-quality programs. During the 2022-23 school year alone, of federal pandemic aid on tutoring, on top of an estimated spent by districts on such efforts. 

Five years after the pandemic dramatically disrupted learning, with the federal aid now spent, America’s education system is still struggling to regain lost ground. The latest reveal persistent academic gaps, underscoring the urgent need for effective interventions.

Amid all the setbacks, tutoring has broken through as one of the few recovery strategies that states and districts are strategically embedding into their budgets—expanding, refining, and solidifying programs that, in some cases, have delivered significant gains in student achievement. 

Even in these politically divisive times, there’s one thing we can all agree on: Every student deserves the opportunity to build foundational skills in reading, writing, and math that will serve them through life. With nearly $1 trillion spent on education each year, we must ensure that investment translates into real educational opportunities that lead to good jobs and meaningful lives. 

High-dosage tutoring delivered during the school day from a consistent, well-trained tutor is the . In Rapid City, South Dakota, a group of retired teachers come to Title I schools each day to work as tutors, one-on-one with predominantly indigenous students. In Harrison, Colorado, paraprofessionals tutor students — and become so inspired by the academic success that they become full-time teachers themselves through innovative educator apprenticeship models. In Springfield, Ohio, aspiring teachers tutor local elementary school students building their skills while shoring up those of their students.

Over the past two decades, our organizations have dedicated significant resources to studying, supporting, and scaling this approach. Not only are we optimistic about what we are seeing, but we are firmly convinced that school systems, policymakers, and philanthropic leaders must double down on their commitment and investment to this transformative work.

This belief is driven by significant progress and success across several key areas: continued on tutoring outcomes; from parents and teachers and schools; viable paths to affordable delivery at scale; new models that solve of time, people, and money; better understanding of policies and data systems that improve tutoring delivery; and a with the potential for significant breakthroughs.  

High-dosage tutoring is uniquely effective in helping students learn, including when implemented at scale. A by University of Virginia researcher Beth Schueler, along with Brown University’s Matthew A. Kraft and Grace T. Falken, analyzed 282 randomized control trials and found that large-scale tutoring programs yield months of additional student learning per year, though effectiveness diminished as programs scale beyond 1,000 students. Yet even large-scale tutoring results were stronger than educational interventions like summer school, class size reduction, and extended school days. Additionally, of continue to find , even in challenging learning conditions. 

Importantly, schools and parents want more tutoring in their schools. The most of school leaders found that high-dosage tutoring implementation increased again last year, growing from 39% of schools in 2022-23 to 46% of schools in 2023-24. This is not just a fleeting post-pandemic trend — schools are investing in tutoring even as federal relief funding winds down, because tutoring is wildly popular with parents. In Louisiana, high-dosage tutoring outperformed every other education policy polled, with an astonishing 90% approval. 

Despite our prevailing partisan politics, the push for more tutoring comes from red and blue states, from city systems and rural counties – with whether tutoring is the next big bipartisan school reform. 

Arkansas passed regulations outlining the characteristics of quality tutoring and requiring student-level reporting of delivery so that the state can manage implementation, elevate best practices, and support struggling schools. Baltimore City Public Schools is currently tutoring over 10,000 students through partnerships with external tutoring providers and a district-run program using paraprofessionals. 

Pitt County, North Carolina partnered with to provide critical tutors to multilingual learners, using technology to deliver services in students’ native languages, including even American Sign Language, in rural schools. And New Mexico is expanding virtual middle school math tutoring statewide, breaking down barriers to access for students in rural areas. 

Federal pandemic aid may be gone, but state appropriators are putting money where they’re seeing progress: Virginia added for academic recovery, with on high-dosage tutoring for its students who are furthest behind academically. Maryland stood up a $28 million middle school math tutoring program for underserved students. And in state funds last year for intensive tutoring.

Finally, we are at the very beginning of a wave of innovation fueled by emerging technologies like AI. Innovation through has helped of tutoring as well as . The months of learning from past studies will soon come from without losing the ability to personalize tutoring sessions, support tutoring quality, and maintain program effectiveness in student learning. 

Collectively, our organizations, and other like-minded organizations such as the National Student Support Accelerator and Saga Education, have supported tutoring delivery to hundreds of thousands of students, have launched and published dozens of studies on tutoring, and have infused tens of millions of dollars into the space to spur innovation and capture learning. But we still have more work to do. 

Five years after the pandemic began, students remain behind where they should be, and the gaps between Black and Latino students and their peers are . Federal relief funding that allowed districts to try new things has run out. And yet the evidence has never been clearer: High-dosage tutoring works and can help millions of students. But without action, this critical intervention risks being lost to politics, budget cuts and inertia. There is with continued investment in high-dosage tutoring. 

We must double down on evidence-based strategies, reject fatalism, and embrace the urgency of this moment. The latest NAEP scores confirm what’s at stake. States, districts, and funders must step up to ensure that every student who needs tutoring gets it. This isn’t just an investment in students – it’s an investment in our country’s future.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and ����Ӱ��.

“We can’t exit this decade with students, in particular low-income students, performing worse than they were performing when they entered the decade,” said Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, a nonprofit funding academic recovery efforts. “My biggest fear is just that people will use the Department of Education as a battering ram for other issues and not use it as a force to take on academic outcomes for kids.”

The Republican nominee, declaring this the “golden age of America,” in battleground states, like Georgia and Florida, than he did in 2020. As expected, Republicans flipped the Senate and will hold at least a 52-seat majority, with a few races left to call. Control of the House remains undecided. 

Observers expect Trump to immediately nullify the Biden administration’s Title IX rule that extends protections against discrimination to LGBTQ students. 

Those who campaigned for Trump, and agree with his promises to end in schools, celebrated his comeback.

“American parents voted for their children’s future,” Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the conservative Moms for Liberty advocacy group, . Her name is already among those being tossed around as a possible . She told ����Ӱ�� that she “would be honored to serve the next president of the United States of America.”

Most clues about Trump’s early priorities come from the conservative Heritage Foundation’s , or Project 2025. In addition to eliminating Title I funding for low-income students and Head Start for preschoolers from poor families, the plan would remove references to LGBTQ people throughout federal policy.

But even if Washington ends up with a GOP trifecta and federal appointees handpicked by Heritage, the president-elect might not be able to deliver on some of his more bold promises to dismantle the education department and of illegal immigrants.

“Some of this rhetoric will be tempered with reality once the administration changes,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. “This is a president that we are very accustomed to. I understand people are nervous; they’re very concerned. But when it comes down to it, there’s also the reality of governing.”

Eliminating the education department, for example, would require 60 votes in the Senate and would likely be unpopular in the House as well, even if Republicans are still in control, said David Cleary, a former Republican Senate education staffer now working for a left-leaning lobbying firm.

“The votes wouldn’t materialize,” he said.

Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, added that “draconian cuts” in spending would also be difficult to pass. That’s why Trump is expected to accomplish some of his conservative agenda through executive orders.

“Let’s assume that there is no grand reawakening to the problems that America faces and people stay in their partisan foxholes,” Cleary said. “Trump will have to take a page out of [President Joe Biden’s] playbook and do a lot by executive action and regulatory plans.”

That would include halting enforcement of Biden’s Title IX rule — which, because of litigation from Republican-led governors, currently applies to only 24 states. Officials would likely restart the process of restoring the 2020 regulation completed under former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, which narrowed the definition of sexual assault and expanded due process rights for the accused.

One LGBTQ advocacy organization called Trump’s victory “an immediate threat.”

“Today, many in our community feel a profound sense of loss and concern for the future,” Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, said in a statement, pointing to Heritage’s Project 2025 as the blueprint for how Trump would roll back policies that allow trans students to play on sports teams or use restrooms that match their gender identity. “With these changes, our young people could face increased discrimination, reduced access to safe spaces and diminished legal recognition.”

Trump, a and, at 78, the oldest candidate ever elected president, is also expected to push for private school choice, perhaps along the lines of the $5,000 that passed a House committee in September. But despite the GOP’s enthusiasm for vouchers and education savings accounts, which allow parents to use public funds for private school tuition and homeschooling expenses, some advocates would like to see greater support for the charter sector.

Petrilli, a self-described “never-Trumper,” said he’s worried about returning to “the political dynamics” of Trump’s first term, which didn’t benefit charter schools.

“Reform-oriented Democrats were sidelined or silenced,” he said. “Given that there are a lot of kids in blue states like California, New York, and Illinois who desperately need high-quality educational options, this would be a terrible development.”

But Rodrigues sees some bright spots in Republicans’ focus on parental rights and school choice. “Those things can be positive when not taken to the extreme,” she said.

She’s encouraged by the prospect of Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana becoming chair of the Senate education committee, where he has already highlighted the importance of improving . 

While the National Parents Union has had close interaction with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and the White House, she said leaders have had ongoing “deep conversations” with those on both sides of the aisle.

“Progress will be made for children in any and all conditions, regardless of what happens in the House and the change up in the Senate,” she said. “I think the depth of our relationships are not confined to one particular party.”

It was the third attempt in two years.

With the school year winding down, some districts never even got word the program existed. Those that participated quickly scrambled to cram it into their schedules.

“The timing wasn’t optimal,” said Matt Montaño, superintendent of the Bernalillo Public Schools, north of Albuquerque, and one of just five districts out of the state’s 89 to sign up. Staff members, he said, were “a little bit less than enthusiastic” about the interruption.

The late rollout was only the most recent snag in the state’s troubled effort to spend millions in federal relief funds for tutoring before the deadline to use the money hits next month.

The first attempt — with an on-demand, virtual provider — met with a meager response from families. A second try never got off the ground because of a contract mishap the state still won’t fully explain. And the delayed start on the third effort means only a fraction of the students slated for tutoring got it. State officials estimate that between 2,000 and 3,000 students received the extra help — far less than the 8,000 they were hoping to reach.

“Clearly, it was not the best,” Amanda DeBell, New Mexico’s deputy education secretary, said of the condensed program. But in July, the legislature pumped new life into the effort, providing $8.5 million for high-dosage tutoring this fall. The state also plans to use what’s left of the $4 million in federal relief funds that they’d hoped to spend last school year to support math tutoring for middle school students.

Data shows New Mexico students still have a lot of ground to make up to combat pandemic learning loss. The state in fourth grade math and reading in the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The experience underscores the difficulty of pulling off a statewide tutoring effort — even one backed by convincing research and millions of dollars in federal relief funds.

At a May tutoring conference at Stanford University, Education Secretary Arsenio Romero spoke candidly about the state’s false starts. 

“Sometimes we as educators are our own worst enemies,” he said. “We go through year-long cycles before we … make changes. You need to be able to pivot.” 

‘All the way to the living room’

Especially when the needs are so great. 

On state tests, less than a quarter of New Mexico students meet math standards and just 38% score proficient in English language arts. The state also continues to operate under to improve education for English learners and low-income, special education and Native American students.

In late 2022, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the state had signed a with Paper, a virtual, on-demand tutoring company. The promised to offer students in high-poverty elementary and middle schools — those hit hardest by school closures — up to 20 hours of free tutoring.

But the state abruptly terminated the contract less than three months later. The model expected families to sign up for help on nights and weekends, which research shows who are furthest behind. Those students might not know the right questions to ask a tutor, and technical glitches associated with online programs tend to frustrate both kids and parents who are already discouraged.

“This service is not providing the results in terms of engagement, support or delivery of service to the state’s students,” Mariana Padilla, then-interim secretary of education, wrote to the company.

Montaño in Bernalillo doesn’t think any students in his district signed up for the program. “Deployment from the state level all the way to the living room of families is a hugely difficult process,” he said.

Paper officials cited multiple reasons for the rocky rollout. The program launched just as students returned from holiday break in January 2023, and the state didn’t give the company enough time to get buy-in from families and schools, said spokeswoman Ava Paydar.

Re-envisioning tutoring 

Romero, appointed secretary by Lujan Grisham in March 2023, faced the immediate challenge of finding a more-effective tutoring provider.

“It really … allowed us to re-envision what we wanted tutoring to look like,” he said at the Stanford conference. 

Three months after it canceled Paper’s contract, the state education department for vendors who could offer a high-impact model, either in person or virtually. The virtual classes that predominated during the height of the pandemic set students back academically by months, even years. But research shows that live instruction from a tutor working remotely can produce positive results if schools schedule sessions during the school day and offer the same consistent and frequent support as an in-person tutor.

The state chose three providers, who were slated to begin serving students last August. But officials abruptly canceled that program before it got started because of a protest from another vendor that wasn’t chosen. The department declined to explain the nature of the dispute, and Romero said the education department never finalized contracts with the three providers.

Some education advocates grew impatient as they watched the school year go by without a program in place. 

“We failed to offer consistent access to quality, high-impact tutoring,” said Amanda Aragon, executive director of NewMexicoKidsCAN, part of a national network of education policy and advocacy groups. She called the spring effort “in no way sufficient.”

While New Mexico may have faced more obstacles than most, other states trying to provide tutoring to thousands of students have weathered similar ordeals.

New Jersey to get funding to districts to hire tutors, and Virginia initially got a from districts when Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced his new All in VA plan, which includes high-impact tutoring in third through eighth grades. In Louisiana, some vendors passed on participating in a program that pays for one-to-one sessions — about half what providers normally charge. 

“Any state that was ambitious enough to take on large-scale implementation of tutoring has experienced growing pains,” said Nakia Towns, chief operating officer of Accelerate, a funding tutoring programs and research. Many have struggled to find high-quality vendors and convince districts to participate. 

With the new state funding, New Mexico is trying something different. The state will provide the money, but districts will issue their own contracts and have flexibility to hire teachers or choose the outside vendors they want. 

District efforts

One reason New Mexico leaders ultimately changed course is that they saw that districts had succeeded in blending tutoring into the school day.

Ten Las Cruces schools participated in a program this past school year with , a virtual model led by credentialed educators. Students who were a grade level or more behind gained roughly twice as much learning as those who didn’t get tutoring, leading the district to invite the provider back this fall, said co-founder Rahul Kalita.

Romero visited one of the district’s schools in October and saw Spanish-speaking students practicing their English skills with a bilingual tutor while also getting math support.

Kalita attributed some of the state’s prior difficulties to a lack of “steady leadership” at the top. Romero is New Mexico’s third education secretary since 2019.

“Funding is critical, but it’s just the first step,” he said.

Further evidence on in-school tutoring comes from on a virtual model that has helped prepare over 500 New Mexico middle school students for high school algebra. The program, continuing this fall, is used in large districts like Chicago, Miami-Dade and Fulton County, Georgia. In New Mexico, the effort includes 19 districts, many of them small and isolated, like Tatum Municipal Schools. 

Located about 15 miles from the Texas border, the rural district had just 26 seventh graders last school year. All of them received tutoring, and over half met or exceeded goals by the spring. That’s a small improvement over their scores from sixth grade, said Superintendent Robin Fulce, but he considers that progress significant because of the “big jump” in rigorous material in seventh grade.

The program has convinced Fulce that students can form tight relationships even with tutors they meet online. 

Recently, two of those tutors passed through town for a visit.

“They brought doughnuts and every kid in that seventh grade went over and hugged them. “It was a very good experience,” Fulce said. To him, the state’s multiple tutoring efforts reinforced that offering services outside the school day doesn’t benefit “kids who need it the most.”

The results, Romero said, influenced the state’s decision to shift gears and make “decisions based on research and data.”

Montaño, the Bernalillo superintendent, estimated that about 800 students in his district received services — roughly half those he felt should have gotten the support. But he doesn’t consider it a wasted effort.

“It was too good of an opportunity for us not to take advantage” of it, he said. 

As a student, JUMP math curriculum creator John Mighton remembers struggling with the subject and then quickly beginning to panic as he fell behind. The fast pace of the curriculum he was taught prevented him from catching up and then his anxieties about being too slow got the best of him. 

“I would always compare myself to the kids who seemed to get things immediately,” Mighton said. “I gave up all the time. I really thought you have to be born with a gift for math to do well and I clearly don’t have it.”

Mighton said that too often, when students “decide they’re not in the talented group, their brains stop working.”

“It becomes a vicious cycle,” he said. “It becomes harder and harder for you to learn math.”

For this reason and others, Mighton built plenty of repetition and review — and an intentionally slower pace — into JUMP math when he designed the curriculum 20 years ago in Canada. It is now used by 10% of all Canadian students as a classroom resource and by about 2 million students globally, including in the United States, Spain, Chile, Bulgaria and Colombia. 

Within the U.S., JUMP provides resources to about 20,000 students annually across Louisiana, California, New York, Washington, Maryland and Michigan. In both 2022 and 2023, the program received grants from Accelerate, a national nonprofit that has given more than $30 million to various groups to scale tutoring efforts post-pandemic. Mighton is using the $400,000 in Accelerate funds to study the impact of JUMP’s curriculum as a tutoring resource in Louisiana and Michigan.

Robin Collinsworth, an instructional coach for math and science at Choudrant Elementary School in Choudrant, Louisiana, which uses JUMP math as both its primary classroom curriculum and as a tutoring resource, said it’s “different from most curriculums” because of its focus on scaffolding.

Collinsworth said that with JUMP lessons, instructors “unravel the content one strand at a time.” 

“By the end of the lesson you weave it all back together in a logical way that makes sense to kids,” Collinsworth said.

Kristanne Grange, a third-grade teacher at R.H. McGregor P.S. in Toronto where the whole school is piloting JUMP’s math curriculum, said that with some previous math resources she’s used that were more based on open inquiry, students approached problems “without any fundamental skills” and were lost. In contrast, Grange said JUMP is “almost back to the rote ways that I used to learn where there was a fact-based repetitive style to the curriculum.”

“This program is very much based on more individual practice, more building on skills as they come,” Grange said. “It’s very much like Legos clicking together. And so the children develop a lot of confidence and have a really good foundation to lean on when they start focusing on a problem.”

Brent Davis is a professor of math education at the University of Calgary who has been collaborating with JUMP and Mighton for years. Davis said there are “typically” between 10 and 20 things a student needs to notice in order to understand a mathematical concept.

“In order to learn mathematics well, to make sense of any given concept, you have to notice a whole bunch of little things around each concept,” Davis said.

Davis said Mighton and the JUMP math team are “especially talented at identifying everything that somebody needs to notice in order to understand the concept” and that all of those things are “already built into” the JUMP math curriculum.

“I know of no other resource that does that,” Davis said. “It is incredibly well engineered.”

Mighton said the number one thing that stands out about JUMP Math is that “we have evidence.”

A study of over 1,000 elementary school students in Canada who were taught with JUMP math found those students made “significantly more progress in math learning in the second year, especially in problem-solving.” 

“JUMP math may be a valuable evidence-based addition to the teacher’s toolbox,” the study states.

, which serves low-income students on New York City’s Lower East Side, saw the biggest improvement in math scores in the city in 2014 — the same year it adopted the JUMP math curriculum, according to JUMP math. Manhattan Charter School did not respond to a request for comment. 

implemented JUMP math between 2017 and 2019. Two of those schools “achieved striking gains” on state tests, according to JUMP math. In one school, the number of students scoring proficient in math increased by 23 percentage points. The NYC Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.

JUMP math’s initial grant from Accelerate, for $250,000, was used to implement “digital interactive lessons that students can use for independent, self-paced learning,” in Louisiana, Mighton said. The lessons were tested last spring with about 1,000 students. Students were given half-hour intervention periods during the school day to complete the digital lessons. 

Mighton said that the digital lessons were created by recording “master teachers” teaching from JUMP math lesson plans and then splitting the lessons into short, two-minute clips. Then, Mighton said, JUMP inserted “digital interactive questions” between the clips to assess whether students understood the material.

“The study’s goal was to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and support systems required to successfully implement a scalable tutoring model to address learning loss among students,” a JUMP math press release said. “The report shows improved overall math proficiency among participating students, whose learning progressed rapidly while using the JUMP math lesson modules over a two-month period, with a statistically significant improvement in scores across all modules.”

Tilman Sheets, a psychology and behavioral sciences professor at Louisiana Tech University, said in the release “the report findings suggest that the implementation of dedicated tutoring support and resources might contribute to reducing disparities in math skills among our most vulnerable students and may help to cultivate an interest in this critical subject.”

Collinsworth, the Choudrant Elementary School instructional coach, said that her school participated in the initial Accelerate study with digital sessions. Collinsworth said a fourth-grade class and two fifth-grade classrooms took part and all three saw gains. Collinsworth said a sixth-grade class also did the digital lessons, but said “there was a glitch in the module” so that class did not show growth.

The second Accelerate grant, for $150,000, is being used by JUMP to study both in-person and online live tutoring with JUMP resources. The study includes about 300 students in grades three through eight in both Louisiana and Michigan. In Louisiana, tutors are Louisiana Tech University students who come into schools for in-person tutoring, according to Mighton. In Michigan, tutors are mostly volunteers, he said, and some do their sessions with students online, while others tutor in-person.

Collinsworth said Choudrant Elementary is also participating in this second pilot.

“Everything is going really well and I expect to have positive results,” she said.

Dana Talley, the chief academic officer for Lincoln Parish School District in Louisiana, which includes Choudrant Elementary, said teachers who execute JUMP math lessons “the way it’s intended just really get good results.”

Talley said it is exciting to see JUMP math branch out into tutoring.

“The way JUMP is set up, the teacher in the classroom is a personal tutor for kids,” Talley said. “That’s how it’s designed. So I feel like it makes a ton of sense. They definitely have the right curriculum to move into the tutoring realm.”

Mighton said he expects tutoring to take on an even greater role in JUMP’s evolution.

“There is such a need,” he said.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and ����Ӱ��.

She was the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools when Saga Education, a nonprofit offering in-person tutoring during the school day, had remarkable results with ninth and 10th graders in the city who had fallen behind in math. scored higher on tests, got better grades and passed classes at higher rates.

“Right away, I saw excitement from our principals,” she told ����Ӱ��. “It was a phenomenal program.”

There was one problem: At the time, it cost $2,600 per student. “The finances didn’t work,” she said.

Three years after she stepped down from her position in Chicago, Jackson chairs the board of Accelerate, a position that grants her a national perspective on K-12 tutoring needs.

Only about 1 in 10 students who need high-dosage tutoring get it, despite evidence of persistent learning loss, according to released last year. To address the challenge, Accelerate recently brought researchers, providers and state leaders to Washington to discuss how to spread effective programs to more students.

Over a day and half, they discussed innovative models, the potential of AI in tutoring programs and the need for clearer data on its impact.  

“We already have decades of research that shows tutoring frequency matters, the teacher matters, the alignment to curriculum,” said Jackson. “What we don’t know is how to do that in this new learning environment. like virtual and small groups.”

But tutoring isn’t the only thing on Jackson’s mind. As she becomes more prominent nationally, she remains a “critical voice” on issues facing the district she once led, said Daniel Anello, CEO of Kids First Chicago, an advocacy organization that helps parents understand education policy.

“She’s a parent, she went through the system,” he said. “And from a racial equity standpoint, she’s always been very laser focused on ensuring that families that are the most marginalized are centered in decisions.”

In December, she spoke up when the district’s appointed school board passed a that embraced neighborhood schools but also signaled a desire to move away from school choice. 

In , she called the resolution “wrong” and accused the board — appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teachers union organizer — of pursuing an anti-charter agenda. 

“There is no justification for taking away the rights of parents and putting the interests of their children at risk,” she wrote.

In an interview, Jackson said while she’s not opposed to neighborhood schools, she feels Chicago’s families have been left out of discussions about the future of their district. She also discussed her work as head of Hope Chicago, an initiative that offers free college to low-income students and parents, and elaborated on her vision for expanding high-quality tutoring.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: High-dosage tutoring has become the most-recommended strategy for helping students recover from learning loss. Can you talk about your experience with tutoring in Chicago? 

Janice Jackson: The study that everyone cites was the [a nonprofit that provides high-dosage tutoring in math]. Right away, I saw excitement from our principals. It was a phenomenal program, but it cost us $2,600 per student at the time. The finances didn’t work. Today, a lot has transpired in this space, which is why I was attracted to Accelerate. I’m excited about being able to do this at scale and cheaper, because that’s what’s going to make it sustainable. That is what is going to help low-income districts that don’t have enough money. 

We have about 50 studies underway. To really see what’s working allows us to move a little bit faster than education typically moves.

At Accelerate’s recent conference in Washington, there was a lot of talk about how to continue providing students extra support when federal relief funds run out. If you were still running a district, how would you approach that?

I’d leverage online and tech tools a lot more than we did pre-pandemic. We did some things during the pandemic because we were forced to, but I’ve been out in the field and I’ve seen a lot of ways we can leverage technology that aren’t as dependent on humans. It frees up the teachers and frees up other staff members to do the real work, which is to get in front of kids and families and figure out what it’s going to take for them to come to school regularly.

I would pay a lot more attention to accelerated learning. We don’t talk enough about that. We keep talking about recovery, and that is a huge deal, but we can use technology to accelerate learning. In traditional neighborhood schools, there are always a handful of kids who could take advantage of an incredibly rigorous curriculum. Maybe they can’t offer that in the school because of the budget, or maybe they don’t have enough students, but you can access that through technology, through districtwide courses. 

Is Accelerate supporting research on the tech side of tutoring as well? 

Yes. The thing that really excited me about Accelerate was the idea that we were going to actually research some of these virtual options. Like so many educators, I saw the proliferation of all these tools, and there’s a lot of crap out there. Don’t make that the headline, but that’s the truth. There are some good tools, too. We need to be able to assess that with rigorous evaluation models. I care a lot about education, but I care even more about quality education.

You also care a lot about college access. What are you learning from your work with Hope Chicago?

Our goal is to narrow the economic and wealth gap for Black and Latino families, and we do that by offering them debt-free college. It sounds simple, but why don’t we do that in this country? We made a lot of progress in Chicago with and . One of the biggest things we learned is that our students and families are more discerning around the financial risk of college than we give them credit for. I remember one student said to me, “If I go to college and I don’t graduate, I’m going to be worse off financially than the person who just sat at home.” That’s a very true —and smart —insight.

With Hope Chicago, we’ve seen students select more competitive schools, and then we also allow one parent or guardian to go to college with them. Last fall, we had 93 parents enrolled in college. 

Are other cities looking at what you’re doing?

We haven’t had anybody else say, “Hey, we want to totally adopt this and take it to another place.” But I want to be clear, I signed up for this for the opportunity to really disrupt higher education. I think we’ll get free community college, but I would love to see, in my lifetime, free college. The United States is behind in education. What if every state in America had a free four-year option, if you make below a certain amount? That is doable, and I would argue is actually necessary for this country. 

At the turn of the 20th century, only about 9% of Americans had a high school diploma. We created a higher education system because America was emerging as a superpower. You needed an educated populace. America is reaching that same inflection point. We’re not going to maintain our same global positioning if we continue on the path we’re going. The demographics of this country are changing. We know in 2045, the majority of the people in America are going to be Latino. But they’re not being educated at the same rate as white Americans.

People would actually go to college in much higher numbers if it wasn’t so expensive. This country can afford to do more.

As you take on these broader challenges, you’re still very connected to the Chicago schools and you’ve had a lot to say about how the school board’s recent resolution affects Chicago families. Why did you write that op-ed?

This is the thing that really angers me. People think it’s OK to tell poor Black and Latino people where their kids need to go. Nobody would ever question a person of means about where they send their children. Nobody questions white people about where they send their children. But we continue to do this.

If we pushed the button today, and everybody had to attend their neighborhood school in Chicago, Black kids would benefit the least from a system like that, and they actually exercise choice at a higher level than any other group. I don’t speak on behalf of the entire community, but I am a leader in the Black community, and I feel like it’s my responsibility to lift my voice up around this issue. 

You think the timing is wrong?

We’re getting ready to make a decision that literally impacts everybody. If you really believe in participatory democracy and an elected school board, why is an appointed school board making this decision? If people vote for board members and they support this and that’s the way it goes, I believe in that.

Let’s not pretend like a resolution is not important. I don’t know where people can rightfully lift up their voices to say, “This isn’t right for my community or let’s have a discussion.” 

Will this resolution hurt enrollment even more?

Black people are — largely working class and middle class Black people, so that has changed communities in a lot of different ways. We think people aren’t paying attention. They may not find time to sit on Twitter all day and argue about it, or come to the city council meeting, or come to the board meeting, but what they do is vote with their feet. They just leave.

There’s a moratorium on school closures until 2025, but it’s likely closures will take place in the future. How did you approach that process when you were in leadership?

Let me talk about Englewood, because that’s indicative of how I think Chicago should deal with enrollment. We had four comprehensive high schools in Englewood that in their heyday, probably had 4,000 students across all four high schools. When we took action, they had maybe [a total of] 400 students. We put out a plan to close those four high schools and consolidate them into one big comprehensive high school and build a brand new building. 

A school is the most well-resourced institution in these communities. When you take that away, you need to put something back. Slapping a name change on an existing building is not going to do it. You have to create a new investment and opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, they called me every name under the sun, but I worked with the community. I didn’t stop showing up. To me, we needed to do that in about seven neighborhoods in Chicago. Ultimately, we didn’t start that plan, because COVID happened. 

I am against a large-scale closing. It should be planned. It shows respect when you lay out a five- or 10-year plan and people know what’s going on. 

This resolution, concerns about enrollment loss — it’s all happening as the city is about to elect school board members for the first time in almost 30 years. How is the community preparing? 

If a mom from Englewood ends up on the board, I’m all for that. But I just haven’t seen that happen. It’s usually special interests versus the union, or the reform community versus the union, and neither group represents the parents. There should be a media campaign. If you walk down the street in Chicago and ask 10 parents, they probably could not tell you anything about what’s coming, and that is a problem.

This is a big change. Parents should be informed, they should be engaged and that’s on the city to do that. 

Disclosure: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to and ����Ӱ��.

The proposed Academic Acceleration and Achievement Grants, part of the administration’s for fiscal year 2025, would target three strategies Education Secretary Miguel Cardona highlighted in January — addressing chronic absenteeism, offering high-impact tutoring and extending learning afterschool and during the summer. 

In a call with reporters, an education department official said the competitive grant program would help put the recovery efforts districts launched with relief dollars “on an even faster track and sustain the improvements that states have put into place.” But to make space for the administration’s priorities, leaders are recommending a few cuts, including a $40 million reduction to a program that provides start-up funds for charter schools.

The announcement of the grant program follows the showing most students still haven’t caught up to pre-pandemic performance levels. But with the current fiscal year budget still delayed by partisan over spending for defense and the IRS, advocates acknowledged that passing a substantial new program will be tough.

The proposal will face “the political realities of heading into an election year and the limitations of the budget,” said Nakia Towns, chief operating officer of Accelerate, a national initiative funding tutoring research and programs. The organization’s leaders began discussing how to provide new funds for tutoring efforts with department officials and the White House last fall, Towns said. But she added that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed concerns about students struggling to catch up.

“Everybody has been in agreement that kids still need more support, schools still need more support for learning recovery,” she said. “Now it’s about what actually gets over the goal posts in the budget process.”

Overall, the Education Department is asking for $82 billion for next fiscal year — a $3.1 billion increase. The proposal keeps spending in line with the caps enacted last year in a to avoid the federal government defaulting on its financial obligations. In his comments, Cardona contrasted the Biden administration’s track record on education with that of his presidential challenger Donald Trump and his Republican colleagues in Congress. 

“This is a budget request that comes on top of three years of historic investments proposed by President Biden and delivered with support from many in Congress,” he said. “It blows the Trump budgets out of the water.”

It includes $18.6 billion for Title I, a $200 million increase over the current 2023 level; a $25 million preschool grant program; and $14.4 billion for special education, also a $200 million increase.

But to keep spending within the federal spending limit, the department targeted the Charter Schools Program, recommending a $40 million cut to the $440 million program. In response, Eric Paisner, acting president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said the budget proposal “falls disappointingly short of prioritizing public charter schools and public educational options for parents who are looking for something better.”

The National Parents Union also criticized the move, saying the program “has played a vital role in empowering communities to establish public, accountable schools tailored to the unique needs of students.”

But the advocacy group welcomed the new competitive grant program, calling it part of the administration’s “deep-seated commitment to not only recovering from the setbacks of recent years, but also to advancing our educational system to new heights.”

The proposal is unlikely to receive a friendly reception in the House, where the Republican majority has frequently reminded the public of the harmful impact of long school closures, particularly in blue states and cities with strong teachers unions. During a , some members suggested districts had either or have little to show for the historic investment.

“I think it unlikely that congressional Republicans would want to shower another $8 billion on school systems,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Schools took far too long to open, express any urgency about absenteeism or learning loss, or start trying to convince the public and policymakers that the dollars were being spent effectively.”

In a statement, North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, who chairs the House education committee, said the budget plan “would gobble up more taxpayer dollars without any shred of accountability.”

Charting ‘a path forward’

Towns, former deputy superintendent for the Gwinnett County Public Schools, near Atlanta, noted that the American Rescue Plan, which required districts to spend 20% of their funds to address learning loss, lacked requirements to ensure the dollars were spent on effective programs. 

Accelerate, however, has urged the administration to ask for more data from districts so they can demonstrate that “kids are getting the intensity and consistency of tutoring that we know is needed in order for it to actually make a difference,” she said. 

Many districts used relief funds to implement strong tutoring programs, added Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University. In January, FutureEd released her report highlighting some of those efforts, including Teach for America’s Ignite program, which this year has over 1,500 college students tutoring 3,500 elementary and middle school students in 21 states. 

She also noted Texas’s Ector County Independent School District, which implemented a contract that rewards tutoring providers with higher pay if students make significant progress.

“There is so much great tutoring happening already and I would love to see us learn from what’s working right now as we chart a path forward,” Cohen said.

One sign that districts are more focused on results for students is the growth of , a technology company that offers an online platform for districts to store tutoring data, such as the number of sessions scheduled and whether students attend. The business received a from Accelerate in 2022. 

Some states and districts initially signed contracts with online, on-demand tutoring providers, but research later showed that students often didn’t use the services. Pearl founder John Failla said he’s noticed greater interest in districts using models that experts recommend.

“All of our data is pointing towards states and districts wanting to run their own programs with their own tutors … versus working with online vendors,” he said.

Almost 450 districts now use the system, with the number of sessions growing from about 13,600 in February 2023 to almost 80,000 a year later.

Cohen added that GOP-led states are among those that have made tutoring and summer learning programs a high priority. Tennessee launched its tutoring program in 2020, which is expected to reach 200,000 students by this summer. And Alabama has concentrated recovery efforts during the summer, with .

As they weigh the president’s budget request, Cohen said she hopes “Republicans choose to consider the success we’ve seen in many red states.”

Offering the yet at students’ recovery from pandemic learning loss, the report showed that students actually made impressive academic gains last school year. But achievement gaps grew wider during the pandemic, and students in some high-poverty districts performed worse than they did before COVID. 

“There’s a whole generation of kids, especially in poor districts, that are half a grade level or more behind still and are going to need extra help,” he said.

The crowd, composed of some of the nation’s top tutoring providers and researchers, wondered what they should do next. 

His answer satisfied few. Despite the high stakes and the imminent end of federal relief funding, many schools still don’t know which interventions are working. As states and districts rushed to hire tutors and sign contracts, many failed to record which programs helped students the most. 

“It is amazing that the systems that we entrust with managing our own children’s learning are terrible at learning themselves,” he bluntly told attendees at the event, organized by Accelerate, an organization that works to scale high-dosage tutoring. “It is so frustrating to hear those questions being asked now when the federal dollars are about to run out.” 

Those dollars — $122 billion from the 2021 American Rescue Plan — expire at the end of September. At a time when the research shows many students are still far behind, the U.S. Department of Education is a chance to spread out use of remaining funds until March 2026, especially if they use it to reduce absenteeism, provide intensive tutoring and extend learning time. But Kane said states should also seize the opportunity to better track which recovery strategies are helping students the most. 

“I don’t mean to complain about water under the bridge, but let’s try to think of this going forward,” he said. 

Education department officials say they’re trying. , all districts will have to provide more details on how the funds were spent. Previously, districts had to show whether they provided summer learning, afterschool programs or tutoring to address learning loss. Now they’ll how much they’ve spent on those areas as well. 

Districts also have to report how many students participated in high-dosage tutoring and “evidence-based” summer and afterschool programs and whether they came from traditionally disadvantaged groups such as low-income students, English learners or students with disabilities. And if states want to apply for an extension, they’ll need to submit a letter explaining how they would use the funds to reach the neediest students. 

“We do want to know more from states and from districts about how they’re putting these dollars to use to support academic recovery,”  Roberto Rodriquez, an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, told ����Ӱ��. “Are we investing in some of these evidence-driven strategies?”

‘Students won’t have caught up’

Kane cited a previous lack of “federal leadership” on collecting such information and said states were hesitant to impose additional requirements not mandated by the 2021 relief fund law.

“States were in the back seat, watching districts make decisions on how to spend the money. They’ve been slow to get in the front seat,” he told ����Ӱ��. He urged federal officials to “publicly challenge states” to continue recovery efforts. “As the recovery dollars are tapering down, it’s clear students won’t have caught up.”

According to , states had about $53 billion remaining in American Rescue Plan funds last November. Rodriquez said the department has received a lot of interest from states on extensions, but no applications yet. 

Even if they don’t get more time to spend the funds, districts still have this summer to focus on students who are furthest behind, Kane said. He recommended that states require districts to inform parents whether their children are below grade level in reading and math and then serve all who sign up for summer school.

Most parents are “fairly removed” from discussions about relief funds, said Bibb Hubbard, founder and president of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that explains achievement data to parents. But she said they shouldn’t be misinformed about whether their children are far behind.

“They often think that’s someone else’s child, not their own,” she said. The , she said, reinforces how important it is that “parents know exactly where their children are academically at the end of the school year.” 

The Harvard study was conducted in partnership with Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon. The district-level results show that students made up  a third of the learning they lost in math and a quarter of the loss in reading. This was more than students typically gained in a year prior to the pandemic. Alabama, for example, saw the most improvement in math and was the only state to exceed pre-pandemic achievement levels. 

Three states rebounded past 2019 performance in reading: Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi. Black students made more progress between 2022 and 2023 than white and Hispanic students, but the achievement gap between white and Black students was still larger last year than it was before the pandemic. 

Despite the growth, most students performed below 2019 achievement levels, especially in high-poverty districts. In six states, the gap between high- and low-poverty districts grew wider in reading between 2019 and 2023. 

Virginia was one. 

“We were struggling to catch up, much less get a step ahead,” state Superintendent Lisa Coons told ����Ӱ��. She added that officials “expect persistent learning loss.”

To supplement declining relief funds, the state added last fall for tutoring, improving literacy and reducing chronic absenteeism. While she said her state would likely ask for an extension, she wants districts to move away from a “buffet” of initiatives and choose programs that fit the effective models outlined in a new state . The resource provides details on how to choose students for tutoring and fit sessions into the school schedule.

“We need to continue to prune,” she said, “and work on the things that we know are showing results for our students.”

Heart Math stood out to Accelerate for its focus on a high-need area, commitment to learning and improving as a tutoring organization and track record of student success, says Accelerate Chief Program Officer Nakia Towns. She says her team found Heart Math particularly interesting for its reliance on volunteers who are professionals in other industries. This provides an affordable solution for districts that can’t sustain paid tutors in the long run.

Towns says it was important for Accelerate to have math providers in its portfolio, as the math gaps caused by the pandemic have been even larger than the literacy gap. 

Emily Elliott Gaffney, Heart Math’s chief executive officer, says the grant will help the Charlotte-based nonprofit continue to extend its program in North Carolina and the Southeast. It will also fund a pilot randomized controlled trial in partnership with Johns Hopkins ProvenTutoring as the organization tests strategies it hopes to implement on a large scale next year. 

One of Heart Math’s goals is to specifically partner with students who can’t afford to hire tutors, more than 90% being students of color. 

Heart Math was founded in 2013 to help young students succeed with math through one-on-one tutoring. The program uses hands-on activities and games, such as connecting cubes, cards and dice, that Heart Math believes develop a conceptual understanding of math, helping to bolster children’s confidence in tackling math problems.

Although Heart Math isn’t the only tutoring organization that is volunteer-based, Elliott Gaffney says its age range, from college to retirement, is unique. Over 70% of the organization’s 1,300 weekly volunteers work full-time jobs. Others are retirees or empty nesters who no longer have children at home. The majority of the volunteers have never tutored before, and they undergo two one-hour training sessions. The first session is on Zoom, where they learn about the needs of their community and how to foster positive relationships with students. The second session is in person. A small group of volunteers gathers with a Heart Math coordinator to learn about volunteering in an elementary school and practice the math activities with each other. Elliott Gaffney says one of the biggest jobs of the tutors is simply to be a positive influence, encouraging the students to build their math confidence.

“The second thing I think that’s unique is the specific math focus that we have,” Elliott Gaffney says. “It’s on early, foundational math concepts, which include things like counting, comparing numbers, place value, and it is all delivered through activity-based, hands-on learning. That’s harder to do in larger groups and in the classroom setting.”

Heart Math begins by interviewing students to determine what type of lesson plans and areas of focus they need. Students and tutors are then paired to meet once a week and are supervised by a Heart Math staff member in a one-to-one setting outside the classroom. The staff member gauges students’ progress and whether their learning is accelerating or if they need remedial materials.

Heart Math uses goals set by the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools to evaluate children’s academic growth. Kids are tested before starting the program and after they complete it to gauge what they have learned. percent of the more than 5,000 students tutored met their goals for progress in at least two math , such as place value and more versus less. Ninety percent of teachers have also reported an improvement in students’ confidence in their math ability.

A 2019 NAEP showed that 49% of Charlotte fourth graders were proficient in math. As of 2022, that number dropped to due to learning gaps from the pandemic. 

To be considered for an Accelerate grant, organizations had to meet six eligibility requirements, including a commitment to creating equitable opportunities for students who lack access to tutoring and a proven track record that shows evidence of success with working with students during the school day.

“We’re also excited to contribute to the research related to volunteer-delivered tutoring. We found volunteers to be extremely reliable, effective tutors. And we know that a lot of districts have limited bandwidth to manage all of that. We found volunteers to be really reliable and effective, even more so than some of our tests with hiring paid tutors.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and ����Ӱ��.

Thursday’s grants, totaling $6 million, add to a growing number of commitments from the outfit that was incubated and launched by the nonprofit America Achieves in the spring of 2022 to confront the educational impact of the pandemic. 

Last month the organization announced five “States Leading Recovery” grants, each in the amount of $1 million, providing funds to Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana and Ohio to bolster state education agencies’ efforts to rapidly develop and scale tutoring programs with the aim of making “tutoring a standard part of the American school day.” Previously in November, Accelerate also announced $10 million in grants to 31 groups to make tutoring more accessible and affordable. 

Accelerate’s mission extends beyond tutoring programming to funding more research around implementation and best practices. In a launch essay penned by Accelerate CEO Kevin Huffman and Executive Chair Janice Jackson and published exclusively by ����Ӱ�� on April, 19, 2022, the duo wrote about Accelerate’s urgent focus on getting more tutoring to more students more quickly in more effective ways: “The nation’s public schools will spend billions of dollars over the next two school years on tutoring and personalized learning in the effort to catch students up. It is critical that these resources both help those who desperately need support today and build a base of knowledge that will change how schools operate moving forward. This can be accomplished only through a commitment to innovation, research and efficient sharing of lessons learned. We are hopeful that Accelerate can help fill this role.”

Research was also a component of Thursday’s announcement, with Accelerate noting that “every grantee will engage in research during the 2023-2024 school year, and ten grantees will participate in an Accelerate-funded research.” 

Below is Thursday’s full release on the 32 programs receiving either $150,000 “Innovation” grants or $250,000 “Promise” grants: 

Today’s grants come from Accelerate’s Call to Effective Action program, which supports innovation, research, and implementation in the tutoring field in order to help expand access to high-impact tutoring and raise student achievement. Grantees are working in 20 states across the country. 

“The evidence behind tutoring as an intervention is strong and the field is making tremendous progress, but we still need more providers with a proven track record that can also scale,” said Accelerate CEO Kevin Huffman. “Before the federal pandemic relief dollars dry up, we have an opportunity – and a responsibility – to identify these providers and ensure they are able to deliver cost-effective programs and present evidence that they get results for kids.”

A recent finds that many districts intend to continue investing in tutoring after ESSER funding expires. However, teachers today are stretched thin as they continue to address pandemic-era learning gaps. High-impact tutoring must be made classroom-ready and easy to implement to fulfill its promise as an intervention. For these grants, Accelerate prioritized tutoring providers that are using technology to reduce barriers to individualized instruction; identifying untapped sources of potential tutors such as paraprofessionals or college students; aligning tutoring content with high-quality instructional materials; and/or designing programming to serve particular groups of students such as multi-language learners, students with disabilities, and those in rural settings.

All Call to Effective Action grantees have shown a commitment to developing and scaling research-backed tutoring models that improve outcomes for all students, especially those in historically underserved communities. Grantees have been selected for one of two grant tracks, Innovation Grants or Promise Grants. High-potential tutoring models that do not yet have preliminary or early-stage evidence of impact on student outcomes received Innovation Grants of up to $150,000 each to support program development, implementation, and data collection. Established tutoring models with evidence of scalability and positive student outcomes received Promise Grants of up to $250,000 each to support program implementation to further develop the respective model’s evidence base. 

Every grantee will engage in research during the 2023-2024 school year, and ten grantees will participate in an Accelerate-funded research cohort led by , a regional office of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a part of this cohort, organizations will be matched with a researcher in the J-PAL network, attend trainings on key evaluation concepts, and receive support to run high-quality randomized evaluations. 

“Every student deserves the resources and opportunities to be successful in school,” said NYC Public Schools Chancellor David C. Banks. “We are so honored to receive this grant, which will greatly expand access to high impact tutoring for students at over 80 New York City public schools.” 

“Amplify Tutoring is honored to be a second year recipient of an Accelerate grant,” said Alanna Phelan, Vice President of Tutoring at Amplify. “This partnership will enable us to further build our evidence base as we continue to scale and innovate on our high-impact tutoring solutions that strengthen reading outcomes for students nationwide. We are excited to contribute to research about how effective tutoring can be transformative for young scholars.” 

“The Call to Effective Action grant will help Joyful Readers serve more than 1,000 Philadelphia elementary students through our high-impact AmeriCorps reading tutoring program in the 23-24 school year,” said David Weinstein, Founder & Executive Director of Joyful Readers. “We’re grateful to Accelerate for this grant and excited to partner with national experts in the field to improve our implementation, evaluation, and ultimately, our student outcomes. Being recognized by a national leader like Accelerate validates the hard work of our staff, AmeriCorps tutors, and school and district partners.” 

The grantees of the 2023 Call to Effective Action program are, in alphabetical order:

100 Black Men of Metro Baton Rouge

Air Education

Amplify

Bamboo Learning

Bay Area Tutoring Association

District of Columbia Public Schools

Elevate Birmingham and Leaders of Excellence

FEV Tutor

Heart Math Tutoring

Ignite! Reading

Illuminate Literacy

Intervene K-12

Joyful Readers

JUMP Math

KIPP Indy

Littera Education Inc

New York City Public Schools (The Fund for Public Schools)

Oko Labs

Once

OnYourMark Education

Peer Teach

READ USA, Inc.

Reading Futures

Reading Partners

Saga Education

Southeast Community Foundation

The Literacy Lab

Third Space Learning

Trustees of Boston University

Tutored by Teachers

Values to Action

Zearn

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to both Accelerate and ����Ӱ��.

Yet, despite all the attention and enthusiasm, tutoring currently reaches — and probably many fewer. How can schools, with the support of tutoring providers, harness the very real positive effects of tutoring and deploy it quickly to more students?

At , the national nonprofit I lead that aims to help make tutoring a standard part of the American school day, we believe that one key answer lies in state policy, regulation and infrastructure. On April 26, Accelerate announced $1 million in grants to Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana and Ohio that will help their education agencies make tutoring more widespread and effective. Our hope is that these states can help create model policies and plans that others can adopt, and that we can continue to build a cohort of states working jointly to make tutoring more effective in the years ahead. 

Quality tutoring relies on several things that innovative new technology and programs are well-positioned to provide: time management, data collection and tailored content. But providers are just half of the equation for scaling high-impact tutoring — schools, and the public education sector writ large, make up the other half. 

Our States Leading Recovery grant program aims to push the tutoring marketplace to become one in which school districts pay only for programs that have a strong evidence base, and tutoring providers bring research backing their effectiveness and commit to outcomes-based contracts. States can play their part by cutting back regulatory snags and creating a path for effective programs.

School leaders sometimes argue that providers, failing to understand the daily challenges of running a school, have overpromised and underdelivered. Entrepreneurs retort that schools have failed to accommodate new ideas, creating implementation barriers that impede success. But cynicism about promised revolutions that never materialized must not be allowed to thwart the ability to significantly upgrade the education system of the future. 

The message we are hoping to send with our state grants is twofold: 

First, to states: It’s time to align policies with priorities and make it easy for school districts to implement effective tutoring. The research now shows what high-impact tutoring can look like — and researchers are beginning to learn that virtual tutoring can be as effective as in-person; that volunteers, paraprofessionals and college students can make good tutors; and that tutoring can be effective one-on-one or in small groups. Additionally makes clear that it should happen during the school day in order to reach the highest-need students in a consistent way.   

At the same time, most school districts have never been stretched thinner. If they are to add tutoring to their plate, policymakers need to set the table. States can do that in a number of ways, such as identifying research-backed programs, funding and supporting implementation, and removing regulatory barriers that make it harder for schools to find blocks of time for tutoring.

Second, to providers: A concerted effort by the public sector to remove barriers to innovation will not mean a no-strings-attached payday — the stakes for students are simply too high. Ed tech leaders and other tutoring providers should anticipate a public marketplace in the years ahead that relies more heavily on outcomes-based contracts with a willingness to cut loose programs that do not meet goals. 

The private sector should also assume that states and districts will increasingly build and rely on preferred-provider lists that overtly prioritize public spending on programs that have a strong base of research and evidence, vetted by outside experts. Curriculum providers know this marketplace well — and it is coming soon to the tutoring space.

In the words of L.A. Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at , the private sector should increasingly expect to “engage in efficacy-based contracting. … If I [as a superintendent] deliver on the fidelity of implementation, meaning I deliver the kids and number of minutes, I expect you to deliver the results. And to the extent that you exceed the bottom line, you get more money.”

Rapid advances in technology are exciting for tutoring and for education. New products and services have the potential to put widespread, effective, personalized instruction within reach in the years ahead. States must get ahead of this by building a marketplace that rewards research-driven and outcomes-oriented providers, and helps schools and districts serve the highest-need students.

Schools and providers stand at the precipice of potentially radical changes in the capacity to deliver tailored, excellent content to students. It will take a collective effort to redesign the standard American school day in order to close longstanding opportunity gaps and help the highest-need students. 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and ����Ӱ��.

It’s 9:05 a.m. at Hendley Elementary School in southeast Washington, D.C. when Isabel Chae meets her first tutee of the day. The American University student pulls the first grader, who she describes as “so bubbly, so bright,” out of his classroom and the youngster asks to get a drink of water. 

He sprints backward down the hallway to the fountain. “Please walk,” Chae calls from behind, unfazed by the boy’s surplus energy.

“I’m like, ‘OK, great. You seem like you’re in a frame of mind where you just want to be extra engaged with the lesson.’ ” 

The college sophomore then appoints the student “Mr. Page-Turner” and makes sure to pause regularly during her read-aloud to let him decode words. During the writing portion of their lesson, she challenges him to print each word in a different color.

She’s honed these strategies over two semesters and a summer of work as a participant in American University’s program, a partnership between the college and DC Public Schools that seeks to boost below-grade-level readers. The 59 tutees who currently work with her and her peers progress about 25% faster in reading than the national average, according to pre- and post-tests administered by the university.

It’s a model experts say has the potential to help millions of K-12 students recoup learning lost during COVID. Researchers point to tutoring, either one-on-one or in small groups, as among the methods for academic recovery. But school leaders looking to roll out such programs have often been by educator shortages and pandemic fatigue.

Recruiting university students who, like Chae, are considering careers in education could “unlock” a huge new pool of human capital for the efforts, said Kevin Huffman, CEO of , a nonprofit organization working to scale tutoring nationwide.

“There are more than half a million people at any given time who are studying to become a teacher in this country and very few of them tutor,” he said. At the same time, “you’ve got districts that need people and it just feels like a match that needs to be made.”

A win-win

Accelerate has distributed $10 million in grants to 31 tutoring initiatives across the country this school year, including $750,000 to a nonprofit working to bring teacher candidates into high-needs schools as tutors. American University’s Future Teacher Tutors initiative is one of the 22 programs in the group’s network, which altogether account for 900 tutors serving approximately 2,500 students across 13 states.

The model is simultaneously a way to “meet the very real needs of students and families [and] an opportunity to strengthen the way we prepare future teachers,” said Patrick Steck, policy advisor at Deans for Impact.

David Murray, program manager for the tutoring initiative at American, agrees that bringing pre-service teachers into local classrooms has yielded a “synergy” that has “been super beneficial, both for the tutors and the students.” 

Normally, students in the school’s college of education would not gain classroom experience until their junior or senior year. But after a recent change, a course typically taken by underclassmen now requires tutoring as a service learning requirement. The majority of students in the Future Teacher Tutors program, which employed 21 undergrads this fall, come from that course, said Ocheze Joseph, director of education undergraduate programs.

“We decided that at American we wanted to … begin to engage our students in hands-on experiences working with students as early as their freshman and sophomore years,” the administrator explained. “The earlier that they are working with children, getting acclimated to the classroom environment, the stronger their confidence grows.”

To Chae, the idea of working as a lead teacher fresh out of college without the in-depth experiences she’s gained as a tutor seems “terrifying.” Now, having spent so much time working with students, she has realistic expectations. It will still be “somewhat terrifying,” she said, “but I know what I’m in for.”

All tutors earn over $20 per hour for their work and the program gives a stipend for transportation via Uber or Lyft, helping undergrads access K-12 campuses that are on the opposite side of the city. American University foots the bill thanks to literacy grants it received from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education via the agency’s partnership and from the Benedict Silverman Foundation, who also provides the used by the tutors.

Most tutors work about four hours per week, but Chae works as many as 12, spending all day at Hendley Elementary on Tuesdays and Fridays. All told, the college sophomore feels she’s “paid very well” and is “given a lot of support.” She and her peers engage in regular training sessions to hone their tutoring skills and meet weekly with a program coordinator. 

Scale and sustainability

Still, the program at American University only reaches a tiny fraction of the D.C. students in need of tutoring, a difficulty that’s plagued similar initiatives in other districts and states as well.

Youth nationwide saw historic backslides in reading and math during the pandemic, with some of the most severe losses for students living in poverty. Researchers say academic recovery efforts have not yet matched the scale of missed learning.

“The puzzle is how you take [tutoring interventions] to a large scale,” Huffman said.

He thinks that’s where Deans for Impact can step in, figuring out how to replicate initiatives like the one at American. The 22 tutoring initiatives already in the organization’s network exist within a universe of roughly 2,100 educator preparation programs nationwide. It’s the “most obvious, glaring hole in the human capital pipeline for tutors,” said the Accelerate CEO.

“People who already want to become teachers, they should all be tutoring students as part of that work. … It would reach millions of kids,” he said.

It’s a vision that Steck, at Deans for Impact, sees as especially urgent on the heels of the pandemic, but also necessary for the long term. Though many districts are now funding learning recovery efforts with federal stimulus dollars, his organization is seeking to lift up financially sustainable models that can operate even after relief funds dry up in 2024.

A central question is: “How do we make high-quality tutoring something that doesn’t just exist in the context of COVID relief efforts … but something that is a standard part of how we support students and communities?” he said.

At Hendley Elementary, Chae sees the benefits in real time for her six tutees.

One of the first graders she works with began the year not knowing all the letters of the alphabet. She would tune out of her literacy lessons because she was frustrated. Now, the girl “lights up” when it’s time for tutoring and persists even when she has difficulty sounding out the words — a trait Chae knows can spell gains far into the future.

“She will sit there and plug away at it. … And I’m like, ‘You’re super close.’ And she consistently gives that little extra bit of effort just to get the word, which is fantastic to see.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to Deans for Impact, Accelerate and ����Ӱ��. The Overdeck Family Foundation provides financial support to Accelerate and ����Ӱ��. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and the Joyce Foundation provide financial support to Deans for Impact and ����Ӱ��.