For a year and a half in 2023 and 2024, Cohen traversed the country, interviewing educators, researchers and policymakers and observing tutoring sessions in seven states and the District of Columbia. 

Now the vice president of policy for the education group , Cohen shares her findings in a new book, out today from Harvard Education Press: .

She explores 鈥渢he accidental experiment鈥� that took place across American schools starting in 2020, as researchers figured out the principles of what was originally called 鈥渉igh-dosage tutoring鈥� but has come to be known as 鈥渉igh-impact tutoring.鈥� 

Its four pillars, according to Stanford鈥檚 : 

1. It must take place at least three days a week.
2. Sessions last at least 30 minutes.
3. Sessions are with a consistent tutor.
4. There are no more than four students working in a group. 

The moment couldn鈥檛 have been more tailor-made for such a comprehensive intervention. In the course of just a few months, federal aid to K鈥�12 schools more than tripled, with districts slated to get at least 90% of the new funding. Federal rules eventually dictated that they reserve at least 20% of the largest pot of money to treat pandemic-related learning loss. Tutoring, Cohen writes, 鈥渜uickly became the watchword of how learning loss should be addressed.鈥�

Cohen interviewed everyone from Stanford scholar Susanna Loeb, whose research helped lay the groundwork for the movement, to Katreena Shelby, a Washington, D.C., middle school principal who somehow found a way to get a tutor for every student in her school.

Ahead of the book鈥檚 publication, Cohen spoke to 蜜桃影视鈥檚 Greg Toppo about her findings and her belief that, despite the bleakness of the past few years, educators 鈥渨ant to do good things for kids, and they’re willing to try new things.鈥�

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

I want to start with a kind of impertinent question: I believe it was former U.S. Education Secretary Bill Bennett who said that many schools serve up what he called a “14-egg omelet.” Have you heard of this?

No, but I like where it’s going.

When what they’re doing doesn’t work, they just do more of the same. I’m guessing you would say that high-impact tutoring does not resemble one of Bennett’s lousy omelets. Are schools truly doing something different?

It’s, of course, impossible to answer universally for every school and every tutoring program. And there have been tutoring programs that haven’t been super additive. But at this point, the schools that have implemented high-impact or high-dosage tutoring within the definition of what that is 鈥� and to the gold standard that the evidence suggests 鈥� are offering something different. Whether that’s home fries on the side of the omelet or a salad, you can choose, but it’s something else.

You write that a couple of places have done better jobs than others. New Mexico, for instance, seems to have made a few missteps. What’s the difference between places where tutoring is working and where it’s not?

Where tutoring works the best is where it is a strategy in service of a broader goal. Sometimes in education we make the mistake of thinking the thing is the goal, and tutoring isn’t the goal. I don’t want people to do tutoring just to do tutoring. I care if kids are learning in school, and so the places that are doing a great job with tutoring, first of all, are doing tutoring in service of the goal of improving learning, and that means it’s often connected to lots of other pieces around instruction, curriculum and all sorts of other things. One is being strategic. Two is recognizing that to do this kind of program well requires a lot of effort on the implementation side, and being willing to put in the resources necessary. Literally assigning someone at a district or at a school a role of high-impact tutoring manager 鈥� who a significant part, if not all, of their job for some period of time is making sure this program is working 鈥� is another hallmark of places that have had success as well.

When you were in Louisiana, you looked at this Teach for America Ignite program, and you mention that it’s become a strong pipeline for TFA Fellows and, by extension, teachers. Should we look at tutoring as a pipeline for teaching?

I think so. We have an evergreen population of college students, even if fewer than we used to. We’re always going to have some amount of college students. And what’s generally true about those young adults is that a lot of them are looking for ways to make some money, and a lot of them are not sure what they really want to do with their lives. So one of the interesting things 鈥� and the TFA program highlights this 鈥� is that when you create opportunities for young people to be involved in education, as a tutor, for example, they start thinking, “Oh, maybe this is a career that I would want to do.”

I like to joke that teacher unions have done such a great PR job that they’ve actually convinced people that they shouldn’t want to be teachers. They’ve convinced the American public that teachers don’t get paid enough and aren’t respected. And if you look at parent polls, more than 50% of parents in this country say they to become teachers.

But what we’ve learned from some of the tutoring with college students is that when you actually give them a positive framework to enter the education space and interact with young people in this way, they start thinking about it. It’s not just the TFA program 鈥� I would say also the in charter schools in New York and New Jersey, that also has had partnerships in D.C. and other places. Similarly, they’re using college grads through the AmeriCorps program. A lot of those young people end up sticking around and becoming teachers.

At a school in D.C., you met Delilah, who you say could easily pass for a high school student, but she’s doing this great job leading students on a lesson about Homer鈥檚 Odyssey. It made me think that tutoring could blur the boundaries between who is an effective teacher 鈥� and how we find them. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I don’t know about 鈥渂lur,鈥� but it certainly broadens how we might think about who can play effective roles in the learning of young people. And we see that in a few places. This isn’t in the book, but in Chattanooga, Tenn., they had a that started during COVID where they actually hired high school students to tutor elementary school students. And those high schoolers, I believe, were getting school credit, and were getting paid. I spoke with this young woman, and she would literally walk down the hill from her high school to the elementary school, where she worked as a tutor and got real-world experience. She said she felt like she was treated like one of the staff at the school, and it was an incredibly positive experience. She is now graduating high school a year early and enrolling at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville to become a teacher, and she’s the first person in her family to go to college. 

The other thing that I did write about is the way that education schools are rethinking the role of tutoring in teacher prep. We have all these college kids or young adults that we might want to expose to education. But then what about those who already think they want to work in education? The dean of the ed school of Bowling Green State University, which is the biggest teacher prep program in Ohio, has always been committed to giving kids as much field work and experience as possible, because she says, “I want to make sure before I send these students as graduates into classrooms, that that’s really where they want to be. How many different kinds of opportunities can we give people who think they want to be teachers to actually play teacher-like roles?” And so they’ve really leaned into tutoring. They think that the experience of me, Liz, trying to really just help Greg master how to read or how to do third-grade math is going to help me in the classroom, but also gives me more touch points to make sure this is really what I want to do. 

Another way to think about that: A principal in Alexandria, Va., told me, “The one thing I’m always looking for is how do I get my kids more time? More time learning. How do we give our kids more time?” And it wasn’t just him that I heard this from. This is a repeated theme that school leaders and teachers feel: Tutoring helps them add time. Time on task, quality learning time. And time is often the most precious resource we have in education, and that is how a lot of folks are thinking about this.

One of the things you say is that if tutoring is woven into a school culture, the relationship that the student has with the tutor can be this “fulcrum that changes the student’s trajectory.” You’re imagining that tutoring could really transform schools at a very basic level, that the student-tutor relationship is transformative for a lot of kids.

That’s right. What made this story so powerful was the power of the relationships. To me, the big takeaway is that young people are really hungry for meaningful adult relationships in ways beyond what even the best classroom teacher can possibly give to a full classroom of kids. Even when I interviewed some of those TFA college tutors, the thing they would tell me that surprised them about their experience was that kids were willing to open up to them even after just building a relationship on a Zoom call and doing tutoring. And I don’t know if it’s because after the pandemic there had been so much disconnect and isolation that people were hungry for a reconnect, or if it’s just a truism of human nature that we like to have relationships with other humans.

There’s something really powerful about bringing more people in to interact with young people in education, in an educational setting, in a variety of ways. And that’s why, even though generally I’m pretty bullish on tech 鈥� I don’t write in the book at all about AI because the stuff’s being built too rapidly 鈥� while tech can inform and empower, what’s happened, at least in the last five years, is really a story about human relationships, and it’s worth telling in a time when people feel more separate.

Near the end of the book, you talk about one way to make tutoring work on a large scale, something called outcomes-based contracting. Would you like to talk about that?

I wrote a whole chapter about contracting, and tried to make it so you wouldn’t fall asleep while you read it. Partly why I dedicated so much space to it is because I actually think that we spend a lot of money on education in this country 鈥� we really do 鈥� and we don’t often get a lot for it. And so it’s interesting that we have this model now. Tutoring is the perfect case study to do an outcomes-based contract, because we have potentially clear outcomes that we’re trying to measure: We want kids to grow a certain amount, and then we can actually link the money to what we’re getting from it. 

Especially now that federal COVID funds are gone, district and state budgets are tightening. I hope we don’t throw the success of tutoring that we’ve had to the wayside and instead think about how do we continue helping it deliver on its promise? And so if you can measure it and then pay only for getting the results that you want, that seems worthwhile, and something that we probably haven’t spent enough time exploring.

Speaking of ESSER funds, that’s a lot of money that’s basically gone. You mention AmeriCorps as well 鈥� AmeriCorps is either. Going forward, where can schools turn if they want to fund these sorts of things? What’s out there that is not at so much risk?

First of all, some districts are using their Title I funds. Now, those Title I funds might have been used for something else, and so you have to maybe make some tough choices 鈥� and I’m not going to say you should definitely do tutoring. I’m saying you should look at the evidence: What are you getting out of whatever it was you were doing? If you’re already doing tutoring and it’s going well, I’d rather a district keep it and give up something else that’s not working as well.

Ector County, Texas, has kept their tutoring program going to some extent, using Title I funds. Some other districts have done some similar work, even as districts like Guilford County, N.C., are having to scale back. But they are repurposing existing Title I funds, often to do this. One reason it’s really important to continue making the case for tutoring鈥檚 impact is that you can convince state legislatures, in some places at least, to fund tutoring. Louisiana put , both for last school year and this current year, into high-impact tutoring. And the funny thing about Louisiana is I didn’t even end up writing about it because it was happening so quickly last year while I was trying to finish the book.

I was like, “Wow, it’s a lot of money. Is this really going to happen?” And this year, 2025-2026, Louisiana is tutoring something like 240,000 kids using $30 million from their state budget, and I think some other district funds too, in a pretty effective model tied to their Science of Reading and their math work. And they have funded a lot of other pieces too, around curriculum, teacher professional development and instructional coaches. So for them, tutoring is that exact thing I said earlier about being a strategy within their broader goal of how to overhaul core instruction 鈥� and the state’s put in real money for it.

Connecticut passed to continue some high-impact tutoring work. But then in other states, we aren’t seeing that. Where to look for money? Can you convince your state legislatures to support tutoring because it works? Some places are able to do that.

And also some city budgets: The mayor in D.C. has . And the mayor in Nashville has into tutoring. 

At the end of the book, you lay out these three truisms from your reporting: “1. Public schools are hungry for new ideas that work. 2. Tutoring works. 3. Nothing is perfect.” It sounds like you’re a bit impatient here, and just want us to sort of get on with it. 

I do! Every single day you have kids showing up to school, and those kids either want to learn or it’s our job to help them want to learn, and we need to figure out the tools to do that. If you look, for instance, at continued problems with chronic absenteeism, we flipped a switch during the pandemic, and we thought we could just flip it back on.  That’s not what’s happened. So I believe we have to continue the sense of urgency that we had in 2021 and 2022, because there are kids every day in our schools. But the other thing I really want people to know is that in all of these places I went, people want to do good things for kids, and they’re willing to try new things and implement new programs and make big changes.

That’s not the reputation that K-12 public education has overall. And I want people to believe that that is part of the story of public education in the United States in 2025. I want us to get on with it, because it’s what people want to do. So let’s just do the thing.

Focused on schools in Washington, D.C., the preliminary results show middle school students attended an additional three days and those in the elementary grades improved their attendance by two days when they received tutoring during regular school hours.  

But high-impact tutoring 鈥攄efined as at least 90 minutes a week with the same tutor, spread over multiple sessions 鈥� had the greatest impact on students who missed 30% or more of the prior school year. Their attendance improved by at least five days, according to the study from the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University-based center that conducts tutoring research. 

Susanna Loeb, who leads the center, called the data 鈥渢he first evidence of a strong causal link between tutoring specifically and attendance.鈥� 

Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, said it makes sense that students come to school more often when they鈥檙e keeping up in class and getting good grades. 

鈥淧art of why kids don鈥檛 show up is because they don鈥檛 feel successful in school,鈥� she said. Forming a connection with a tutor over several weeks or months can also make students more motivated to attend, she added. 鈥淚 do think it’s an impact of high-dosage tutoring, not necessarily just tutoring.鈥�

The early findings, which will be expanded in a future paper, reinforce the benefits of offering high-impact tutoring during the school day. The extra instructional time helps schools address two of their biggest post-pandemic problems 鈥� learning loss and chronic absenteeism, the researchers said. The White House has urged districts to not only target remaining federal relief funds toward those areas, but explore ways to sustain those efforts when they dry up. 

Districts that continue tutoring programs will likely keep 鈥渟tudent achievement top of mind,鈥� Loeb said, 鈥渨ith greater engagement 鈥� including increased attendance 鈥� as another outcome they hope to see.鈥�

also demonstrated how to successfully integrate tutoring sessions into the school day. The state education agency, which has spent $35 million on the program, funds staff members in charge of rearranging the schedule to accommodate the sessions and track data on student participation.聽

鈥淭hey took that off the plate of the principal,鈥� Christina Grant, D.C.鈥檚 state superintendent, said at a January conference hosted by Accelerate, an organization that works to scale high-dosage tutoring. She added that working with researchers like those from Stanford can help districts communicate the impact of federal relief funds. Without those partnerships, she said, 鈥渨e would look back three years later and not be able to tell the authentic story around what happened to $35 million.鈥�

The district, which had a chronic absenteeism rate of last school year, began its tutoring program in 2021. Officials awarded grants to a variety of providers, including , which focuses on high school math and teacher preparation program.

Sousa Middle School, in southeast D.C., works with George Washington University鈥檚 , which pays college students interested in STEM or education to work as tutors.

鈥淢y challenge, when this program first began, was getting students to come and not look at it as a form of punishment,鈥� said Sharon Fitzgerald, Sousa鈥檚 tutoring manager. Now students who have 鈥済raduated鈥� out of the program ask why they can鈥檛 come back. 

Students responded well, she said, because it鈥檚 a 鈥渂reak away from seeing their regular teachers every day鈥� and because they look up to the college students. The tutors, she added, also have a clever way of giving students a taste of how much more they鈥檒l learn during their next meeting and if they attend class everyday.

鈥淚t was what the tutors left them with in the last session that encouraged them to come to school,鈥� Fitzgerald said.

The results are likely to spark more interest in how tutoring and attendance initiatives can work in tandem.

鈥淲e have not intentionally used tutors as a way to address attendance. I can imagine that it could help if part of their work focused on that,鈥� said A.J. Gutierrez, co-founder of Saga Education. 鈥淚 see potential.鈥�

Chang, with Attendance Works, said the results are 鈥渙n the right track,鈥� but don鈥檛 go far enough. During the , several states still had chronic absenteeism rates over 30%, including Alaska, New Mexico and Oregon.

Tutoring doesn鈥檛 address all of the barriers that keep students from attending school, like health conditions or bullying, she said. But tutors could refer students to school attendance teams when those concerns surface.

鈥淲hat more could we get,鈥� she asked 鈥渋f tutoring was tied to a bigger strategy, a more comprehensive approach?鈥� 鈥�

Bassett, chief executive officer of the , said high-impact tutoring is needed for students 鈥� particularly in high poverty areas that are often understaffed and under-resourced.

鈥淚t helps raise scholar skills, it helps raise scholar confidence and it sets scholars up for success. That’s not just me saying that 鈥� it’s research proven,鈥� Bassett told 蜜桃影视.

NJTC currently serves more than 40 schools across 17 of the state鈥檚 21 counties, comprising about 1,300 students from urban districts in Essex and Camden to rural districts in Hunterdon and Sussex.

Through the work of NJTC tutors, the number of K-8 students performing at grade level in math improved from 16 to 40 percent and in literacy from 23 to 40 percent.

As the New Jersey Department of Education allotted about to 240 school districts, the tutoring company aims to grow to nearly 80 schools. 

鈥淭here is a deep sense of urgency at this moment, and our mission these last few months has been to create a solid and consistent institution on which teachers and school leaders can rely,鈥� Basset said in a statement.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

New Jersey鈥檚 spring 2022 showed test score declines 鈥� particularly in math and English language arts. With this in mind, how would you describe the educational needs in New Jersey schools?

The pandemic caused some gaps in learning 鈥� absolutely, there’s no denying that. However, gaps existed prior to the pandemic, particularly for our scholars who come from high poverty backgrounds and high-need schools that are often understaffed and under-resourced. These are the scholars we work with and focus on. They definitely need help beyond what a classroom teacher with 25 to 35 scholars at a time are willing to do. Because of this, I鈥檓 not anticipating there’s going to be a miracle occurring when the new 2023 student learning assessment data is released. (Note: This interview was conducted prior to the release of the 2023 student learning assessments. Updated test scores can be checked out .)

Which school districts or areas in New Jersey have you noticed students need particular attention and support?

We’ve worked in 17 out of New Jersey鈥檚 21 counties. We鈥檝e been in urban areas, rural areas and suburban areas. As somebody who taught in a rural area, I would definitely stress that our rural schools need just as much help as our urban schools. In many cases, they need the same kinds of help and for the same reasons. So I would not want to overlook our rural schools or suburban schools that are struggling. 

Is there a particular subject you have found needs more support in the state? 

Math and literacy are both critical needs, but I would say based on the data that I have seen, our scholars need more help in math than they do in literacy. But, they still nonetheless need help in literacy.

I understand the New Jersey Tutoring Corps targets K-8 students. Are there particular grade levels you have noticed need more attention and support?

There’s this book, and it’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek book, called 鈥淎ll I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten鈥� that references the social-emotional skills young kids need, like getting along with people, collaborating, resilience, curiosity 鈥� all of those things. But on top of social-emotional skills, your foundational academic skills are also set in kindergarten, first and second grade. 

For literacy you’re learning phonics and for mathematics you’re learning number sense. What does the number one mean? What does it mean to add something to it? We want to help scholars as young as we can because that’s where all of your learning is grounded. So those three grades are very important to us.

What about third through eighth grade?

Third, fourth, fifth and sixth grade students are also important because they were the ones greatly impacted by the pandemic. They鈥檙e generally behind and need to get those foundational skills in a way that’s not insulting. For example, if you’re teaching phonics to a fifth grader you have to approach it in a way that’s different from teaching phonics to a kindergartner. We need leveled libraries in New Jersey with reading material that is grade-level appropriate.

With seventh and eighth grade, you鈥檙e getting ready for high school. This is sort of your last chance to get those skills down so you can move onto high school and be successful. That’s the goal we want for every scholar we work with. Helping them be successful in life by getting those math and literacy, but also, social-emotional skills.

Are there any stories that come to mind when you think of the significance high-impact tutoring has had at the schools you work with?

We’ve had our Boys and Girls Club partners tell us that when they do their surveys at the end of the year, tutoring is always their students鈥� favorite thing to do. Not swimming or computer gaming or coding 鈥� they like tutoring. And why? Because of that personal relationship, that personal attention. 

We had a reporter visit the Trenton Boys and Girls Club, and she was speaking with a couple of math scholars in fifth and sixth grade. She asked them 鈥淲hy do you like this?鈥� because earlier in the day she noticed tutors going to pick up scholars and the scholars that they weren’t picking up were saying 鈥淲ait, wait, isn’t it my turn yet? I want to come now. I want to go to tutoring.鈥� 

One of the scholars told her 鈥淚 didn’t get math until I worked with Miss Hawk鈥� 鈥� Miss Hawk being one of their tutors. He continued saying 鈥淚 would look at numbers and I didn’t understand what they were. I was being asked to do things that I didn’t understand. And now I get it. Math is just putting things together and taking things apart. It’s that simple.鈥� That was his explanation of math. And now when he goes back to school, he gets it. That’s why this matters.

New Jersey gave about $41 million in grant funds to implement high-impact tutoring. How will this initiative help mitigate pandemic learning loss across the state?

When high-impact tutoring is done correctly, the research tells us that it works. It helps raise scholar skills, it helps raise scholar confidence and it sets scholars up for success. That’s not just me saying that, it’s research proven. I always describe our tutoring program as research-based and evidence rich. We鈥檙e based in research and we have a ton of evidence that what we are doing works.

We make it a point to listen to what teachers are instructing to get to know the scholars 鈥� both in terms of their academic and social-emotional skills. That way the same tutor can work with the same scholars throughout the learning cycle. That consistency is important so scholars see the same adult faces.

How does the need for high-impact tutors speak to the broader conversation of teacher shortages in New Jersey and across the country?

Look at what’s happening nationwide in education 鈥� people aren’t going into teaching anymore. This is a very real, very serious and very impactful situation. We have to figure out how to change it. Raising teacher pay is one way, but I think it’s raising respect for the profession and really treating educators as professionals. That will make a big difference in terms of bringing more people into the profession.

At the New Jersey Tutoring Corps, we are interested in being a retainer and pipeline into the teaching profession. We use pre-service educators as tutors. Meaning they have to have 60 school credit hours or more. In many cases, this is the first experience pre-service educators we work with have sitting one-on-one or in small groups with scholars and seeing what a difference they can make. 

I can’t tell you how many of our tutors have said to me 鈥淚 didn’t think I wanted to be a teacher but working for the New Jersey Tutoring Corps validated that I do want to be a teacher and why I want to be a teacher.鈥� The experience working with very small groups on very targeted pieces of academic content really makes a difference. 

We have also had one tutor who shared that after her experience she realized she did not want to be a teacher. And to me, that’s just as important as finding out that you do want to be a teacher. To be able to help people figure that out early on is very important. 

A number of our tutors have been hired by the districts they鈥檙e working with. So high-impact tutoring has proven to be a pipeline that helps address the need for teachers in New Jersey.