Knox County Schools looked like it was doing everything right.

The district was using a well-regarded, evidence-based curriculum to teach students how to read. Young students who struggled got intensive tutoring using high-quality supplemental materials. Tutoring sessions took place during the school day, ensuring high participation.

But the 60,000-student district in eastern Tennessee wasn’t seeing the results from tutoring that leaders had hoped for. Erin Phillips, the district’s executive director of learning and literacy, decided to try something new: ask tutors to use materials that matched what students were learning in the classroom.

Working with outside researchers during the 2024-25 school year, Knox County Schools randomly assigned more than 300 early elementary students who fell below the 40th percentile on a universal literacy screener into two groups. One group received tutoring using the district’s usual supplemental materials. The other got tutoring using materials that were aligned with the district’s core curriculum, Benchmark Advance.

The results, described in a , were striking. Students who received tutoring that aligned with classroom instruction made more progress, the equivalent of an additional 1.3 months of learning, compared with students in the control group whose tutoring sessions used supplemental materials.

This approach and the outcome might sound like common sense. But it goes against a widespread way of thinking about intervention, that if students didn’t learn the material well in class, they might benefit from new ways of approaching it or different explanations of the same concepts.

But the study suggests the opposite was true, that teachers and tutors may have inadvertently confused students by, for example, teaching different letter sounds in different orders or referring to the “magic e” in one setting and the “silent e” in another.

The findings are important as school districts look for ways to make tutoring more effective with limited dollars. School districts were urged by experts and officials to invest in high-intensity or high-dosage tutoring, generally defined as occurring at least three times a week and for 10 weeks or longer, as an evidence-based way to address pandemic-related learning loss. But large-scale tutoring programs often .

The education sector jargon for what Knox County is doing is “coherence.” That’s simultaneously an increasingly popular buzzword and a .

In Knox County’s case, “What we were asking our most at-risk learners to do is carry the heaviest cognitive load,” Phillips said. “We were calling the same thing by different names in every learning experience. We were overloading their ability not only to have that knowledge in their brain, but to retrieve that information, not only retrieve it, but then apply it, and then transfer it from place to place.”

Using aligned materials, in contrast, lightens their cognitive load and gives them more opportunity to practice the same skills covered in class, she said.

Knox County students using aligned materials also did better on state standardized tests, according to the study from Jackson and Shakeel, though the difference was not statistically significant.

Tennessee is in its fifth year of a major early literacy initiative that includes teacher training, state-approved curriculum lists, mandatory tutoring for certain students, and holding back students who don’t meet certain benchmarks by third grade.

Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator’s notes that alignment seems like it would be good practice but doesn’t have a strong research base. Jackson, research manager at the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, said she wanted to address that gap with a randomized controlled trial.

“We were testing something lots of people very much believed would be true, and that a lot of people have talked about for a long time,” she said.

Jackson said she hopes other researchers try to replicate her findings in other settings and with larger groups of students.

Phillips is moving to adopt more aligned curriculums across subjects and grades. She’s also continuing to closely monitor student learning, including whether fewer students score in the bottom quartile or are referred for special education evaluation.

She said the study results shed light on a long-standing problem in the district.

“We had a decade’s worth of data showing us that students were not exiting intervention,” she said. “They were becoming intervention lifers. That’s not the intention of this support. All this data was showing that this was not working.”

Different curriculum choices can create an unhelpful ‘lasagna’

Many factors have nudged districts away from using aligned curriculum for students in intervention services, according to TNTP, a school improvement consulting organization that worked with Knox County.

Large established publishing houses dominate the market for core curriculum, while dozens of smaller companies fill in the gaps. When states draw up lists of approved curriculum, core and supplemental materials might go through different approval processes, and districts might not see materials from the same company on both lists.

Grants might also require districts to pick materials from certain vendors, contributing to a proliferation of different learning materials that take different tacks.

“We build this lasagna of program over program over program,” said Devon Gadow, TNTP’s director of national consulting.

Surveys by the research organization Rand Corp. found that , with the average teacher reporting they used two core curriculums and five supplemental curriculums.

And a found more than 350 different supplemental math products in use across 1,700 school districts. These same school districts chose from fewer than 20 core curriculum options.

While districts often put significant time and attention into assessing core curriculum options before making a decision, they adopted supplemental materials in an ad hoc way, in part because the contracts were shorter and less expensive, the analysis found.

TNTP is to look at ways they may be steering districts away from using more-aligned materials. The group also wants district leaders to look at what they already have in their arsenal that they could redeploy.

Gadow said district officials should be wary of marketing pitches based on coherence or alignment. They may not need to buy something new as long as they’re already using high-quality materials.

Core curriculum often includes materials to support scaffolding, remediation, and intervention, Gadow said, but classroom teachers don’t have the time to read through every page and develop lessons for struggling students. That’s work that central office staff could take on.

In Knox County, Phillips said teachers had developed a habit of using supplemental materials in the past when the district’s core curriculum wasn’t as good. Those habits were hard to break, in part because those past experiences led teachers to distrust that any core curriculum could cover all the necessary ground.

Phillips spent roughly $1.4 million from what remained of Knox County’s pandemic relief on aligned supplemental materials from Benchmark at the beginning of the study period. But if she had it to do over again, she would have looked more closely at what already existed in the core curriculum, she said. That’s what she’s doing now for other subjects. Most teachers are on board with the change, she said.

Meanwhile, she’s phasing out materials from other publishers as licenses expire, saving money going forward.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

In this episode of Class Disrupted, hosts Michael Horn and Diane Tavenner turn from schools powered by artificial intelligence to the tools themselves.

Matt Pasternak, founder and CEO of , shares the company’s journey from its low-tech beginnings to an AI-powered platform for early reading instruction. Pasternak shares how Once now delivers effective, personalized one-on-one tutoring through software, while emphasizing the importance of human connection in the learning process.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. Good to see you after a few episodes, diving deep into school models and thinking all about AI and what it enables today.

Diane Tavenner: Indeed, we are going to shift gears a bit today, not away from AI because based on all the emails, the calls, the feedback we’re getting, this is the thing folks are thinking about and talking about. And so we’re sticking with AI. Rather, we’re going to shift away from AI school models, full school models, and infrastructure to how AI is being used directly by and with teachers and students and in classrooms. And so I think this is going to be a really interesting other dimension of what’s happening.

Michael Horn: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, we thought this was the next logical place to go. Everyone says if you’re not changing the classroom at some point, you’re not changing much. And so we wanted to go into that classroom and explore how a small number of folks, entrepreneurs, are thinking about really how do we use AI in classrooms without the entire school itself or the system around it being changed. And so this is it. I’m really excited for this conversation. Someone we’ve both known for a long time and get to go deeper on it Diane.

Diane Tavenner: A very long time. I’m really excited today to welcome Matt Pasternak to the conversation. I was trying to think about when we met Matt, but it feels like so long ago. I can’t even remember at this point, because you, you actually were early at School of One, which is now Teach to One as a director of assessment. And then you went and you were on the founding team of Clever, which many people will know as a tool that effectively connected edtech products to student information systems. So this really critical infrastructure piece that enabled so much of what we now sort of take for granted in terms of technology. And then most recently, you’re the founder and CEO of Once, which is a company that leverages, well, I’m going to say what I think it is, and then we’re going to get into it. You’re going to really describe it for us.

A company that leverages the research around tutoring by using reading-based software and human people to teach 3 to 7-year-olds to read. And so we’re just grateful to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Matt Pasternak: I’m thrilled to be here. I’ve known you both for quite some time, and it’s really an honor to be on the show.

Michael Horn: Well, we’re thrilled you’re making the time for us. So let’s dig into it. As Diane mentioned, you are working on solving a problem that we’ve talked about on this podcast historically, which is teaching reading, something that there’s a lot of evidence around how to do. But as Diane said, before tackling this reading challenge, you helped build Clever. And it does feel like a big shift from, if you will, school infrastructure to teaching, learning, curriculum. Maybe it’s back to your roots in some sense from School of One. But tell us about the origin story of Once and your own personal why for building it.

Rethinking Early Reading Education

Matt Pasternak: Sure, sure. Well, I’ll share two things. You know, one is that, you know, very early in my edtech career, before Clever, I worked on some projects that were very, very expansive in what they tried to accomplish, and both on the data infrastructure side as well as on the curriculum side. And it was sort of the heady days of the late aughts or early 2000s, and then the early 2010s, excuse me. And sort of this belief, if you just sprinkled a little bit of technology or software magic on things, education, everything would just work. And there were these really exciting analogies to Netflix’s personalization. I’m sure you remember those days. And so I spent some time trying to boil the ocean.

And then after that, I just kind of made an abrupt turn and never looked back. And I said, look, I want to work on specific problems in education. And the first one was what Clever tackled. It was an area I had a lot of insight into from some of those earlier explorations on, you know, the specific problems that rostering and single sign-on presented to schools, and particularly schools trying to adopt software in varying ways. After Clever, I kind of went in a little bit of a different direction for a while, focused on voting. And then in the sort of early to mid-pandemic, I was catching up with an old friend of mine who had been a teacher in the same school where I taught after college, and we were talking about how during the early pandemic, both of our kids who are kindergarten age were out of school because schools shut down. And yet both of them learned to read in that year out of school.

Now, my wife is a former kindergarten teacher, and so I was like, oh, I had an unfair advantage, you know? I mean, she had sort of one-on-one tutoring from a kindergarten teacher. Missing kindergarten, but, you know, my close friend was a former middle school teacher, and, you know, it’s not like he had been working on that expertise forever, but he said, yeah, you know, structured 15-minute lessons every day, you know, his child learned to read, and we just sort of stepped back from it and said, wait, you know, for as long as anyone can remember, we’ve been teaching kids to read, attempting to teach kids to read, in these sort of 30-person classrooms, and, you know the numbers, and in sort of any education environment, about half of kids, if given some of the right foundation, will learn to read to some extent. And so any teacher can look at their progress and say, well, some of my kids are learning to read, it’s working. But if you want all of your kids to learn to read, you know, you can’t say that what’s happening today is working, because we’ve had flat NAEP scores for decades. And so we just started to kind of think really big picture and say, you know, what would happen if every kindergartner got the education that our two kids had gotten in the early pandemic, which is just 15 minutes a day of one-on-one reading instruction. And initially, we actually wanted to avoid schools, avoid K-12. We said, look, the sales process in the K-12 is so complicated. Let’s do something different.

Let’s actually focus on, because preschool, you know, research was just coming out about how early the brain starts developing. For where children begin, you know, learning, you know, are able to learn to interpret written language. And then as we start to explore the preschool route, we realized that that was probably even harder than K-12. And so we kind of returned to our roots and started in a charter school, actually was our first implementation, and basically just said, hey, can we put a couple people in the back of this TK classroom and teach, you know, have them provide daily one-on-one tutoring to the students to help them learn how to read. And we had some amazing success stories, and, you know, it was just a couple-month pilot. There was a child who, a child who came to school every day, you know, lots of home context, crying and kind of hiding under his desk and did not want to be in school, And it still makes me kind of emotional to tell the story, but, you know, even a month or two in, he was sort of opening up to school and responding to school, and people asked him, you know, what had changed, and he said it was the one-on-one tutoring he was getting every single day. You know, and that’s a 5-year-old who, you know, that’s going to determine the next, you know, the rest of his life, essentially. And so, you know, we kind of took that and said, and the folks who were providing the tutoring, had not had background as reading tutors.

That was really important to us, because we said there just aren’t enough kinds of trained reading specialists in the country to do this at a scale of 4 million kids a year. So you need a method that allows any adult to access material and provide this instruction. And then we had this really interesting call with Portland Public Schools, and this is kind of right after that first, right as that pilot was winding down. And we were talking to them, and they said, well, you know, we can’t, you know, we can’t afford to, you know, sort of put all these other people, you know, pay you to bring all these other people into schools and teach kids how to read. We don’t even know where you’d source them. But they said, look, we have tons of instructional assistants. That was a position that they had at the time who were supposed to be working on reading in the early grades. You know, could we use this type of program with them? And that was kind of our lightbulb moment because we said, look, you know, we are, we’re not an HR company, right? We have no expertise in how do you hire, you know, tens of thousands of tutors all over the country to provide this instruction.

We, you know, attempted it in some pilots and literally were unable to source even like a couple tutors in some metropolitan areas. And so we said, We want to work with the staff the school already has. And that really, that, you know, that conversation launched everything. We did not win that deal. We did not end up serving Portland Public Schools. It was okay. That learning that they gave us in that phone call was, you know, worth its weight in gold. And I’ll always be grateful to them for that experience and taking the time with us at that early stage in our journey.

Diane Tavenner: Matt, I love that we’re going to get sprinkled into this conversation, this bonus of just what it’s like to try to build something and sell the schools and whatnot. So that’s really fun to hear that piece. Listening to your origin story, people might be saying, wait a minute, you’re spending this season talking about AI and education, but it doesn’t seem like Once is related to technology even, or AI. And in fact, you began in that pandemic period. So before the sort of famous release of ChatGPT in November 2022. And so, you know, as a guy who at face value seems to have been tech-forward, what was your sort of original hypothesis and approach to making sure, you know, to just sort of going what it seems like a full human approach to reading? And is there technology in here anywhere?

Matt Pasternak: Yeah, so it’s a great question. I think it has, there’s a two-part answer. There. The first is that one thing we were certain of from day one was that young children learn best from adults, like actual in-person human-to-human instruction. You know, for millions of years, you know, our species and the predecessors of our species have been, you know, teaching children to identify different berries and, you know, what animal is going to hurt them and which ones are safe and, you know, how to survive. And that was all done, millions of years of evolution. For, you know, in-person communication between an adult and a child, where the child was highly motivated to learn because the stakes were life and death. And sort of the idea that you would deviate away from that just sort of seems somewhat crazy on its face to us.

Matt Pasternak: So that was the motivation for, you know, you need to build trusting relationships with adults, and, you know, technology is scalable in a way that people sometimes aren’t. So how can we apply technology? But let’s do it in a way that deepens that connection and doesn’t attempt to replace the connection or build a kind of robot teacher. You know, the other piece of this was that I’ve had the privilege in my career, I’m not a software engineer, but I’ve had the privilege to work with, you know, some very, very, very incredible software engineers. And what I’ve often noticed is that when you start working with some of these folks, the first thing they’ll say is, hey, let’s build a version of this product in Google Slides or Google Docs or Google Sheets. Let’s build something that’s throwaway, but that we can learn from because we’re going to waste too much time. This is a little bit before the days of live coding, but we’ll waste too much time coding something up. Let’s be really, really lean in terms of how we want to model what we want to accomplish. And so our perspective at the beginning was, That’s what we want to do.

We literally started in, you know, Google Slides and Google Sheets were essentially our technology. And, you know, funders who were interested in tech staff basically ignored us because we weren’t very technical. But the one thing we said we were going to do from day one is we wanted to record every single instructional session that was given. So even though we’re talking about recordings on Google Meet, we sort of knew where things were going. I mean, yes, you hadn’t had these massive releases of OpenAI and various things, but AI was in the air, the late teens, it was in the air. Folks knew where this was going. Technology was going to fundamentally change. And we just had this belief that if you had hundreds of thousands, millions of hours of recordings of adults teaching kids to read, even if you had no other technology, that you could then, one day run software over that archive and begin to do things that others would say, oh my gosh, I wish I had this sort of database, but I don’t.

So that was, I think those were kind of the two key decisions and motivations for that early, less technical beginning.

Michael Horn: Well, so let me actually jump in there then, Matt. Let’s fast forward us to where you are now. So you’re not going to be an HR solution. You say we’re not in that business. You have all these recordings. What does Once look like today? What does it do? How’s it maybe similar, different from, you know, those initial, put aside the very early pilots, but, you know, once you sort of got on the ground and running, tell us how it’s evolved from that?

Matt Pasternak: Yeah. So what we do today is we serve sort of two different audiences. We serve school districts and we actually serve parents at home. And so I can kind of talk about those a little bit in turn. But what we do, I’ll start with school districts. In school districts, we solve two interlinked problems. One problem that we solve is that there are too many kids in school districts who have not effectively learned how to read. And sometimes I think the best evidence of that is when you have, you know, middle schools or high schools saying, hey, we figured out what we have to do differently.

Phonics and Staff Upskilling Initiative

Matt Pasternak: We have to start really emphasizing phonics in 7th and 8th grade or high school. It’s like, on the one hand, great. Kids who haven’t learned that do need to learn it, but that’s the evidence of an enormous problem, because there’s really kind of 1 to 2 years of phonics to learn, and if you’ve had 9 years of schooling and that’s like, that’s the set of activities, that indicates just a huge, a huge, you know, a huge mess basically in the early grades. So one problem is reading, and the other problem is a lack of career ladder for entry-level staff in schools, which is also a really important problem because schools are having tremendous challenges finding a large enough teaching staff to teach the children in school. And so we said, let’s solve both those problems at once. By providing coaching and curriculum to elementary school support staff, you know, paraprofessionals, teaching assistants, instructional assistants, you know, there’s a number of different roles, as long as they’re not lead classroom teacher, because then they have to oversee 20 or 30 kids. By providing curriculum and coaching to those folks, we can upskill them to the point where anyone can provide one-on-one tutoring daily for 15 minutes to, you know, kindergartners is where we focus. We do some TK and first grade, but kindergarten’s really our focus, provide 15 minutes of daily instruction to those children.

And what this looks like, you know, kind of from a technology perspective, ‘cause again, we started very low-tech, we’re now, we are a software solution today. And what this looks like is the child and the paraprofessional sit down side by side in front of an open laptop computer, We call it, we teach the parents how to build a one-desk classroom. So they have their desk, it’s all set up with the physical materials they need and their laptop computer, they sit right there. A ton of work has gone into that organization. And on the screen is, on one part of the screen is what the child’s looking at, on the other part of the screen is the script for the adult. And the adult is basically going through the script and the child is responding to the script and looking at their part of the screen. And going through a number of different science of reading-based exercises and tasks that teach the child how to read. And the adult is using a fair amount of judgment in there as well, you know, identifying when are children saying things the wrong way, when are they saying things the right way, how do you keep children motivated through this process, but the kind of focus is what’s happening on the screen.

And then we record those sessions and we provide coaching. We have a national team of coaches who then watch those recordings, and provide feedback to the paraprofessionals about how to improve, you know, essentially how to improve their instruction. Like you’re basically watching game tape of yourself and using that to improve your instructional techniques. So that’s sort of a big piece of what we do.

Diane Tavenner: Super interesting, Matt. Can you, so you’re starting in this very low-tech way with these Google spreadsheets and slides and, you know, basically prototyping what you’re gonna do. And If I remember correctly, you were videoing and then literally like doing training calls with those folks, you know, like, oh, we watch your video and let’s coach you up on this essentially. And now that’s, that’s a much more seamless software experience as you just described. Take us to that moment where AI becomes the reality and you’ve made this really smart bet and you have all these recordings. How does AI figure in here? And we’re trying to be really thoughtful. We’ve recognized that people use the word AI or whatever that is, acronym AI, to describe almost everything, like this massive range. So the specificity is super helpful of like how you actually use it here and what role it is playing.

Matt Pasternak: So we use it in a couple of ways. All of our AI is behind the scenes. there’s, So you know, this is not a chatbot. This is not, you know, either the paraprofessional asking a quick question, wait, how do I do this? Or obviously the student doing that because, you know, they couldn’t use a chatbot, they don’t know how to type yet. It’s all behind the scenes. One key way that it’s used is we are able to administer oral reading fluency tests very, very frequently on the students because we’re capturing the full session. And so then we you know, we have, have all the data, the speech data, the transcript data from that session, And so we can go and we can evaluate oral reading fluency. You know, in a typical classroom, elementary school classroom, if they use some, you know, assessment like DIBELS, the teacher might do 3 oral reading fluency assessments during the year, once the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Each one takes roughly a month because the teacher has to pull each kid aside one-on-one and administer this test. And so it’s like 3 months, you know, of instruction to some extent are spent not providing instruction, but performing these tests. And that’s just, you know, that’s not the best use of teachers’ time. And so simply by just having all the kids individually learning on camera, we’re able to run these tests in the background, and we have you know, results, every 2 weeks. So that’s a really important piece of AI. Again, the parents may have no idea that AI is even involved in that, and that’s great. Like, this is not you know, sort of that Gemini sparkle in the corner. This is just like, no, it’s actually just making the experience seamless.

Connected Phonation and AI Learning

Matt Pasternak: The next thing that we do is we’re huge fans of what’s called connected phonation. Again, if I’m going too deep into Tales of Literacy, let me know. But you basically, know, a lot in, in some systems, even sort of science of reading evidence-based systems, there’s a lot of focus on kind of tapping out individual sounds. So if I want to say the word bat, it would be the /b/ sound, the /æ/ sound, the /t/ sound. And when you teach a child like, oh, you just sort of say /b/, /æ/, /t/. And it’s like, well, that’s bat. Like, that doesn’t sound like bat. That sounds like /æ/t/.

You know, it sounds like these sort of disconnected sounds. And you can, you know, that is again one way that people teach it. But I think the more modern approach that, you know, University of Florida and others have really emphasized is connected phonation. So you’re not, if a B and an A come sequentially, you’re gonna teach a child to go, ba, like that B is kind of a quick sound and then they’re gonna go right into that long A sound and they’re always gonna do that when they see those sounds in sequence. They connect those sounds. Well, not only do we have audio of what’s happening in the lesson, but we also have little sliders underneath the words, and so a child can move the slider while they’re saying the word, And we can use AI to really notice things about, you know, is the child’s finger actually tracking what they’re saying? How much are they connecting? Are they pausing in the right places? Because some kids, you know, maybe they know the word “bat,” so they just want to jump in and say it really fast. Well, that’s great for that word, but you don’t then learn the fundamental skills that will help you read much more complex words. So, you know, evaluating something like how quickly does a child’s finger move on the screen is another beautiful application of AI?

Then really for us, the last one, it seems obvious, but it’s just using AI to write code. It’s just we are able to move 10 times as fast on 10x fewer resources as we would be able to otherwise before this moment in time. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without AI assisting in development. But I’ll say, sort of one level deeper is, you know, where does it go from here? Is it just these sort of fluency tests and, you know, kind of tracking fingers on the screen? You know, as we progress, you know, you can really use AI to evaluate, you know, student fluency in real time, right? How did they just pronounce that word that was just said? This is a much harder technical problem than it sounds like because while the tech world has made huge advances in interpreting adult speech, where you basically try and eliminate the errors to turn some garbled thing an adult says into something intelligible. With kids, you want the opposite. You actually want to figure out which of those sounds when they pronounce that word was incorrect. Rather than automated speech recognition, you want automated phoneme recognition. And if you ask, you know, folks who are really deep in that world, everyone will admit we don’t have good automated phoneme recognition today.

It’s just not there yet. But we have, again, the video archives that will let us build towards that. So we’re very, very excited about that. You can also begin to use AI to you connect, know, reading, many folks regard as multiple strands. So there’s comprehension, there’s, you know, there’s phonics, there’s phonemic awareness, there’s these different elements of it. And so how is a child progressing on these different strands, and how does progress on one strand kind of influence what you would want to teach them next? So really, that sort of learning engineering And then the final piece, just to kind of fill out the story, is, you know, a lot of folks will tell you, I’ve heard on your episodes before, that, you know, 90% of learning is motivation, you know, 10% of the technology, the curriculum, but most of it is really the motivation. You know, we have, if you want to learn, between YouTube and all the different educational apps out there, like, there’s never been a better time in history to learn, and yet we see, you know, essentially flat performance over the decades. Well, one way to motivate both learners, but even more importantly, their teachers, is to show them a highlight reel of like what’s gone really well.

Well, it is prohibitively expensive for us to, you know, manually curate a highlight reel of every session of instruction. But if a pair has taught 10 kids and at the end of that day, or 20 kids, know, you they get to see, hey, here’s a 30-second recap of like your best aha moments during the day, I am coming in tomorrow. I’m not gonna call out sick. I’m not gonna do anything else. I’m going to do it, and I’m going to kind of push those kids as far as I can take them. And so that might be the most magical application of AI at all, not even kind of automated phoneme recognition, but just literally highlight reels of the incredible instruction we’re seeing.

Diane Tavenner: That’s fascinating because we’ve had several conversations about motivation here, and I personally have felt kind of unsatisfied about those conversations. So this actually seems like a really amazing use of the technology related to motivation. Let me ask you about something that comes up, I think, a lot in the reading conversations, dare I say the reading wars, which is this idea that kids need to be reading things that they’re interested in and that they care about and that they’re motivated by, you know, those sorts of things. When you’re in this early stage of teaching reading, are you personalizing what the kids are reading at all? Does that matter? You know, is technology supporting that? What’s going on there?

Matt Pasternak: Yeah, it’s a great question. We are definitely keeping an eye on the ability of AI to generate what we would call, or what many people in this sort of industry would call, decodables, which are texts that students are able to decode. A lot of times things are called decodables, that actually aren’t decodable to the student. So one thing that’s really interesting about reading is that, you know, you might think, well, if a kid, you know, if they can read 75% of the words, like, that’s probably good enough. Like, that’s better than not, you know, being able to read 10% of the words or something. But actually, comprehension often requires, like, being able to read 90 to 95% of the words. So if you want to build decodable texts, like, there is not really a margin for error. You need to make sure that kids are reading text with words that they are able to decode.

Doesn’t mean they’ve memorized those words. I’m not talking about sight words, but they’re able to decode those words. And the challenge of reading English, not true of all languages, but English, is that, you know, a single letter can have many different sounds depending on what other letters are around it and kind of how it’s positioned. And so if you just tell a computer, build stories using this letter or you know, using this sequence of letters, it will often inadvertently pull in the wrong, pull in the words that the kid isn’t able to decode. Well, if it pulls in one of those, maybe that’s OK, they can figure it out from context. But if you’ve got, you know, a page with 15 words and 5 of them aren’t decodable, like, this decodable is not decodable. And that’s where kids can lose motivation. So it’s deeply interlaced with this concept of motivation.

So we’re keeping an eye on it. We don’t think it’s quite there yet. At the age that we’re working at. You know, I know some people working in higher grade levels, and I don’t have the expertise there, but in the kind of 3 to 6-year-old grade level, we are very, very carefully still hand-curating stories at this point.

Michael Horn: It’s fascinating, Matt, because as you alluded to, there’s this huge conversation around can you level reading? And, you know, some of that is directed at particular publishers that tried to do it in a way that was not related to Decodables, and some of it is just a broader conversation. I’m taking some new information away from this conversation, so I appreciate that. Let me shift though, rather than go too deep in that, because one of the other things that you’re doing, I think, is pushing on how AI can start to redefine the role of the educator themselves, right? In some ways, you have AI, it seems, making sure that they stick to what’s the evidence around how to teach reading the best, right? So that we’re not getting too far ahead of ourselves or freelancing in ways that may be detrimental. Then you’re also deferring to judgment, it seems, for the educator around that motivation piece and what they’re seeing on the ground with the kid in ways that you just can’t pick up with technology today. Help us understand that shift over the time around what you think that Reading Coach ultimately is and that split between technology, the human judgment, and how that gets redefined. Maybe we make it easier, frankly, or more people can be great reading coaches in the future?

Empowering Adults to Teach Reading

Matt Pasternak: Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question. It’s a great question. You know, our vision is that any adult, and by adult, actually broadened to older teenagers, are able to teach children how to read. And I think if, you know, if you look, you know, we sometimes cite a stat that, you know, 95% of kids are taught, you know, the ABCs by their parents or guardians, right? It’s like parents and guardians, they’re trying to do the right thing, They just don’t know what to do. Like teaching a child the ABCs, for a couple kids will teach them to read, for almost all other kids, it will not teach them to read. And so, and so they have, they’re motivated, they know how important this is, they don’t know what to do. So we want any adult, doesn’t matter if English is your second language, it doesn’t matter, you know, if you’ve struggled to read yourself, like we want to empower any adult to be able to teach any child. Now, you know, you do sometimes, there are conflicts where, do I want to give the adult who’s delivering the instruction more autonomy so they can kind of grow more in their career, or I want to remove a little judgment and make it a little more scripted? And I think over time you’ll see dials in our system where you can kind of dial it up and down either way.

Because once you get to the point where it’s just the computer speaking, well, now you’re back to just computer education with an adult patiently sitting there. That’s not how kids learn to distinguish berries, right? Like, we’re actually, we’ve gone too far. So the adult needs to be really, really involved in that teaching, but, you know, understanding their capacity and what they feel like, you know, sort of, you know, because it’s not just reading a script. It’s, you know, the hardest thing in teaching reading is what do you do when a kid makes a mistake, right? Like, we have a whole sort of flowchart, a whole approach we take when a child makes a mistake decoding. And being able to implement something like that is hard. And so software can help. Our biggest innovation kind of in this regard, which is something that we’ve just started to roll out recently, is no longer restricting this actual teaching to paraprofessionals or instructional assistants or existing support staff at the school, but actually broadening that circle to older high school students. That’s where I sort of hinted at teenagers.

And it is, we’ve just gotten started here, so we, you know, we are learning as much as they are. But I’ve seen some pictures and I’ve seen some videos of a high school student sitting down next to a kindergartner, teaching them to read, with the, you know, the little kindergartner just eyes full of adoration. You know, this is not a teacher, this is someone who they deeply look up to, this, an older kid who actually cares about them. And it is so inspiring. And if we had a world where our high school students could knock out reading specialization for a large number of our kindergartners, I mean, I think it would change it.

Michael Horn: Generational impact would be huge.

Diane Tavenner: I mean, yeah, when you called me with this idea, Matt, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since because I think that this is the type of thinking that we need in education right now because this checks so many boxes. I mean, not only are we putting multi-age groups together and learning, right, but we are giving, let’s talk about the impact on the high school student here who feels a sense of worth and purpose and is actually doing an early job, gaining real experience coaching and developing person. Who knows where that could possibly lead? And then you have this brilliant idea of enabling them to be entrepreneurial. Like, imagine a neighborhood where teenagers in the summer sort of have the Once tool and they can open their own little neighborhood business teaching kids to read in the summer. Like, I love this so much for so many reasons. It’s really brilliant.

Matt Pasternak: Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, we are, you know, again, we’re learning so much right now. But the response, you know, I mentioned I kind of joked earlier about, you know, selling to school districts and how hard that was. And I mean, it really is every entrepreneur’s challenge. And in K-12, you know, there are these magic moments when school districts don’t become hard to sell to. It’s really hard to find those products. Like, it is extremely hard. Clever was one of them.

Student-Led Reading Program Growth

Matt Pasternak: I mean, Clever just blossomed across the country, and it was so exciting to see, you know, sort of help it spread and kind of watch the spread, and it was something very special. You know, we are not operating at Clever velocity right now in terms of distribution, but we have gotten such an outpouring of response, superintendents who write in saying, you know, I get a million cold emails a day, you know, I don’t read any of them, but when I saw high school CTE students teaching kindergartners how to read, I was like, oh, that’s it. You know, that’s, that’s so obviously it. And we’re hearing that response. One thing that’s so exciting, to date we’ve primarily focused on kind of top 500 districts, it’s very large districts. A lot of them are urban, but you know these very big school districts. And we are getting this response from tiny districts, you know, also from some large ones, but from tiny ones, from districts that can’t really afford to have paraprofessionals, but they’ve got high school CTE students and they’re looking for a great thing for them to do. And they’ve got kindergartners who aren’t learning how to read. And it’s like, let’s go, you know? And that is just amazing.

And so we are flying to, you know, towns across the US right now that, you know, we’ve never heard their names before. And just being embraced by the folks who are there and just going right in. It’s, it’s just, it’s wonderful.

Michael Horn: That’s so cool. I mean, I think about the leadership opportunities, responsibility, judgment, just like it’s checked so many boxes. And then again, the generational impact, if you do that at scale, could be humongous. Let’s wrap up with this last question, which is before we go to our what you’ve been reading and watching outside of work thing. But, you know, look, Once, as you just talked about, is designed to be facilitated by, could be an instructional aide, parapro, high school student, whatever, it’s not a whole class curriculum, right? And so you talked about those magic moments where districts actually start to absorb it and so forth, but take us into the classroom itself. How are schools putting Once into their schedules and days? How are they integrating it? What’s the impact it’s having about how they think about, you know, the whole class activities that they perhaps have been doing? Are there trade-offs that they’re having to make? Help us understand where does it lock into the current schedule?

Matt Pasternak: It’s a great question. It’s like the fundamental question to making tutoring work. I mean, a lot of the leading tutoring researchers have said tutoring is fundamentally a question of logistics. You know, anyone, you know, so many providers have great training and many have great coaching and various things, like can you get the logistics right or can you not, know?

And so we go very, very deep with our school district partners. We have, you know, a world-class, we call them our program team, and they go in and they work because it is not like, they’re not district-wide answers to how you solve that question. You cannot go to, you know, XYZ Public Schools with 100 schools and say, OK, we’re going to do once during these blocks in this space in the school, because every school has slightly different requirements, different spaces, you know, different people. It’s all different. And so we go school by school. We help them map out a schedule. Will this instruction happen in the back of the classroom? Will it happen in a little annex room that’s right near the classroom? Does it happen in the hallway if the hallways are quiet? Often in elementary schools they are, it just sort of, again, depends very much on that school. Oh, you know, here was this space that was used for teachers to congregate, but teachers aren’t actually congregating there, or, you know, the lunchroom is actually empty from 8 to 10 AM every day, that’s unused space, like, let’s take advantage of that.

Customized Solutions for Every School

Matt Pasternak: We have worked with so many schools by this point, we just have thought through all these different permutations. And so we sit down with the schools, school by school, come up with a customized solution for each one. And, you know, the challenging part, if you’re listening to this, is that it sounds hard and expensive and, you know, and it is, I don’t want to minimize like that is, that slows down scale a little bit when you have to kind of do hard things. On the flip side, we have never come across a school that can’t do this. So sometimes you have a solution that says, oh, well, when we rewrite the language of schooling, when we completely change what schools look like and how they’re structured and what the day is, then that will unlock AI and unlock everything, and then kids can finally learn. And if you’ve been around schools for a long time, I think many of us would be pessimistic that you’re going to see rapid changes in those dimensions anytime soon at scale. And so we’re really proud of the fact that we can go into any school district, any school building, and we will find a way to, you know, to build up the schedules. And the neat thing again about the application of technology, in our earlier days, we, you know, back in the kind of Google Meet and Google Sheets days, it took so much training and coaching on how to make those very lightweight technical tools work that realistically someone giving instruction could only give it to, you know, would have to give it to at least 10 or 15 or 20 kids because the investment you put in and teaching them the ropes made it, it just wasn’t worthwhile to teach a single kid.

But as we’ve amped up our software and amped up this use of AI, you know, we can realize this vision. You have high school kids coming in and doing it. The school secretary, does she have a free 15 minutes or 30 minutes? That’s 2 kids right there. In many schools, the principals say, hey, I don’t want to just administer this. I want to work with the you very hard, not hardest, like most difficult kindergartner, the most challenged kindergartner, the one who maybe has, you know, home circumstances that are you know, the most or, challenging, you know, who has you know, a, a learning difference, or for some reason is really struggling in the classroom. I want to take that kid under my wing as a school principal, and I you know, I want to teach that kid to read, and I want the school to see that I’m teaching that kid to read. And it goes a little bit back to, you sort of think of Steve Jobs, he’d go into Apple devices and he’d look at the wiring configurations in the background, like the things customers could never see. And he’d say, if the wires are messy in the back, then it shows that we don’t actually care about what we’re building and we’re never going to build good stuff, even though customers would never see that.

And I think it’s that attention to detail. And historically, principals maybe are really strict about kids lining up, are really strict about like certain small details that then create that school culture. Well, here’s another detail that shows, you know, my focus is on the kid, and it’s really beautiful to watch.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, well, and thank you for that. In early elementary school, I mean, Michael and I have talked about this often, like we are hard-pressed to think of something more important than what happens in early elementary school than literally every child learns to read. And so I’m glad to hear that people are doing what’s necessary and that they understand that it’s totally possible to organize school in a way that every child will learn to read. That feels so critical. So thanks for the inspiring story of what you’re doing and the connection between the humans and the AI. Really, really fun.

Diane Tavenner: And so now, of course, Michael and I are very curious to hear what you are personally reading or listening to or watching outside of your work. We try to stay outside of our work.

We break our rule often, but if there’s something that you have to share, we’d love to hear it.

Matt Pasternak: Oh, well, no, I’m happy to. Actually, yeah, I feel like for many years between raising kids and having intense jobs, I really didn’t find much time to read other than, you know, sort of the newspaper and things like that. But I have recently joined some book clubs and gotten back into reading, which feels great, and I cherish it. I’m currently in the middle of Demon Copperhead. I don’t know if you’ve read that, but the first part was so depressing. It just, you know, it’s, you know, lightly based on Dickens, and it just felt like, oh my God, like just kind of going down that, going down that hole. And it was a little challenging to get through. And now things have turned around a little bit.

So I haven’t finished it. I’m excited to see what happens. But I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. And then for watching, I just got to watch, I watched Alex Honnold’s ascent of the Taipei Building on Netflix.

Michael Horn: Very cool.

Matt Pasternak: Which was very fun. I watched it after it was over, so I knew at the beginning he was going to stay safe. But I got to watch it while running on a treadmill, which is a really fun experience. I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to push myself that hard. It’s like, well, this guy’s doing something much harder, so I can at least run fast. So that was enjoyable.

Diane Tavenner: That’s awesome. Well, Michael and folks who’ve listened for a long time will know that when I tell you we’re preparing for a trip to Morocco and southern Spain, that means that I’ve got a combo fiction and nonfiction reading list that I’m working through because that is sort of how we do vacationing. And on this one, I’m digging into sort of religion, culture, history that is not very familiar to me. So it’s been a fun learning journey. I’m grateful to Gemini, who is my study buddy for this one and is actually such an incredibly useful tool for these purposes. At the moment I’ve got 3 books going. So, one is called Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood by Fatima Marisi. Sorry, butchered that one.

And it’s not what you think. I’m learning a ton. It’s actually quite an interesting feminist, story,, and then 2 others. So Islam by Karen Armstrong and No God But God by Reza Asad. And those are really interesting different perspectives on the religion that I’m sort of reading side by side with each other. So super fun.

Michael Horn: Very cool. Very exciting. I always love when you share these, Diane, because as listeners also know, you’ve changed my own practice around travel, uh, to start to do this habit as well, and Matt, I liked your Dickens, reference because it connects in an odd way for the one that I’m going to do, which is Diane knows I don’t read a ton of fiction, but I actually finished a fiction book here, In the Shadow of the Greenbrier by Emily Matchar. I’m probably also bungling her last name, but I picked it up, honestly, I was at synagogue. I saw it in the temple library, and Greenbrier was a place that we used to vacation with my grandparents and my cousins a few times growing up over Christmas. And so I was sort of curious, and it’s like this intergenerational Jewish sort of mystery story, if you will, trying to piece together different puzzle pieces. And the Greenbrier is sort of the central part of it.

But the only reason I say that, Matt, is I remember one of the years that we vacationed at the Greenbrier, they had like the foremost Charles Dickens expert or something like that in residence, and he gave lectures, which we as 12 or 13-year-olds dutifully attended and I think did not cut up too much during, which, which was impressive for us. But, so I, I feel like I’m connecting on a bunch of these things at the moment, but, uh, it was a fun read, and Diane, one of the reasons I don’t read a lot of fiction, I forgot, is because when I read it, I don’t put it down and I become a bit of a zombie around the house for a couple days.

Diane Tavenner: So yeah, there is such a thing as binge reading, just like binge watching, right?

Michael Horn: Exactly. And nonfiction, while I love it and I read it a lot, turns out it doesn’t do that for me, whereas fiction I’m a lost cause around the house.

Matt Pasternak: The secret is just simultaneously reading it on the Kindle and Audible, and then you can, you know, you can volunteer, hey, I’ll go do the dishes, you just put in

Michael Horn: Exactly, plug it in and power through.

Matt Pasternak: You keep going, right, you know, right where you were.

Michael Horn: So good, good tip, good power tip. All right, huge thank you, Matt, for joining us. And again, to all of the listeners, who keep coming in with all sorts of feedback, both positive notes, questions, we like those and then some of the hate mail too, we love it all because we learn tons, and just, keep it coming off this conversation. We look forward to more, and we look forward to seeing you next time on Class Disrupted.

This episode is sponsored by LearnerStudio.

High-impact tutoring was widely embraced by thousands of school districts as they grappled with learning loss, whose deficits have proven difficult to overcome even in 2026. In its ideal form, is delivered to no more than four students at least three times a week, for at least 30 minutes per session, by a specific adult using high-quality materials aligned with a school’s curriculum. Most such programs take place during the school day, which ensures access to all students and signals that the tutoring is core to their academic progress. Getting students the requisite sessions and minutes to yield meaningful progress is , according to and advocates.

Afterschool tutoring, as a result, has taken a backseat. As tutoring’s popularity continues to grow, however, some providers and schools are applying the lessons learned about high-impact tutoring to out-of-school programs that have yielded impressive results. ’s afterschool model, for example, has helped students in California gain in math, on average, and 92% of parents say they would recommend the program. In Louisiana, helped students in less than six months of afterschool tutoring. 

As part of ongoing research into the high-impact tutoring movement, I spoke with educators and providers about the success of these two afterschool programs, both of which launched after the pandemic.Ěý

Elsie Whitlow Stokes Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., had tried working with two providers to build tutoring into the day. But for a language immersion charter school already spending additional academic time helping students learn Spanish or French, finding time during regular hours tutoring was a struggle. So this school year, Maribel Wan, Stokes’ chief academic officer, started offering Step Up’s afterschool tutoring program to 59 students in grades 2 to 5 who are around one grade level below where they should be. Students meet twice a week with their tutors, who are college students paid through work-study at their schools.

Wan says early metrics show improvement in the students’ confidence and attitude toward schoolwork, and she hopes the tutoring will pay off academically as well. In other words, she hopes Stokes will find the same success with tutoring as Monlux Elementary in Los Angeles. Monlux started working with Step Up Tutoring in January 2022 as the school, like so many across the United States, struggled to close achievement gaps that widened during the pandemic. That year, just 43% of Monlux students scored as proficient on the California state math assessment. Three years later, on the, 62% of Monlux students met proficiency. Principal Hermineh Markosyan, who launched the partnership with Step Up, told me she attributes much of their math improvement to tutoring. 

Part of the program’s strategy is to engage parents as partners in their children’s academic progress. Estefany Gomez is on the frontline of that family engagement as a Step Up tutor. She has met with a student at another L.A. district school twice weekly for three years now, continuing even after Gomez graduated with a bachelor’s degree in molecular cell and developmental biology from UCLA in July 2025. “My student will graduate from [Step Up] in a few months, and there’s still more to do. … It’s such an out-of-this-world feeling to see his growth over the last few years,” she told me. 

In the initial postpandemic years, nobody knew whether virtual tutoring would work as well as in-person help. Today, however, multiple studies have shown that virtual tutoring is about as effective as in-person tutoring and resolves many of its operational challenges. There’s no travel time to a short in-person session, for example, schools in a variety of locations can recruit tutors without geographic constraints and college students can tutor during class breaks. Afterschool providers like Step Up have doubled down on these early findings even as others, like Louisiana’s Canopy Education, remain committed to in-person tutoring. 

Canopy is the largest provider of tutoring supported by the Steve Carter Tutoring Program, a state-funded voucher that gives students achieving below grade level $1,500 for after-school help using state-approved providers. When William Minton was building Canopy’s program, he explained to me, “We knew we wanted to use teachers, and we knew that we could make it work if we paid them well.” Teachers are paid $30 to $60 per hour to tutor after school with Canopy, running in-person small-group sessions at the same school where they work during the day. Almost 2,000 Louisiana students received tutoring last year through Canopy across 298 schools. Minton attributes their success to three key pieces: quality, communication and consistency.

More than three decades ago, the wrote, “For the past 150 years, American public schools have held time constant and let learning vary.” Elementary schools that have adjusted their daily schedules to include an intervention or tutoring block find this use of time worthwhile, but many schools struggle to change their master schedule. Tutoring has also found less purchase in middle and high schools, perhaps because timing becomes yet more complicated as students move to a day filled with course-specific class periods or block schedules. Leveraging out-of-school time, then, especially when closely linked to within-school activities, might allow more students and more schools to benefit from high-impact tutoring. 

The key to the success of these afterschool tutoring programs may be that both Step Up and Canopy incorporate critical aspects of high-impact tutoring into their models. Students are eligible for tutoring based on school assessment data, the dosage is 90 minutes per week or more, and the tutors use high-quality materials aligned with what students are learning in school. In spring 2025, Step Up Tutoring’s attendance rates were north of 75%, according to CEO Sam Olivieri.

“We work with a large percentage of non-English-speaking families and low-income families,” she says. “They get weekly texts from their tutor about what their children are working on and an accomplishment they can celebrate. We’ve really focused on bringing parents into the process and giving them a lot of visibility.”

Canopy’s bet on family engagement is that using teachers as tutors in the physical school building creates stronger bonds between families and the school, while Step Up gives parents and tutors tremendous flexibility when it comes to scheduling sessions. 

Afterschool high-impact tutoring may thus be poised to help schools add effective learning time beyond the academic day, while bolstering parent involvement in their children’s learning and the school community. It’s certainly a trend to watch, and for more schools to consider.

Traditional high-impact tutoring can cost upward of $2,000 per student a year, and staffing is the single biggest constraint. At the same time, shortages of qualified teachers persist, with districts struggling to recruit and retain the educators students need most.

These two crises, a tutoring access gap and a teacher pipeline shortage, are usually treated as separate problems, but they shouldn’t be. Among the full landscape of education interventions, high-impact tutoring is one of the most consistently effective, evidence-based strategies for accelerating student learning. The results are replicable, offering up a solution to both crises that is currently hiding in plain sight.

Each year, more than 600,000 aspiring teachers are enrolled in educator-preparation programs across the country. Another 600,000 college students are employed through as well as state programs, such as . We can, and must, activate these people as tutors for the students who need them most. To do that, policymakers should act on two fronts.

First, unlock Federal Work-Study dollars for tutoring. The infrastructure already exists. Work-Study employs 600,000 college students annually in federally subsidized campus jobs. Redirecting even a fraction of these positions toward high-quality tutoring would create one of the largest, most cost-effective tutoring workforces in the country without requiring new appropriations.

This is already happening. Step Up Tutoring engages college students paid through Federal Work-Study or College Corps at 40 colleges and universities across 15 states, making it one of the fastest-growing Work-Study–powered tutoring programs in the country. Step Up delivers one-on-one virtual tutoring and mentorship to over 5,000 underserved students annually in more than 40 districts across four states. Its students are outperforming peers by wide margins; an independent evaluation found that students receiving tutoring with Step Up gained two to four additional months of learning in math compared to a control group.

Critically, this model both expands the tutoring workforce and strengthens the educator pipeline. This year, 73% of Step Up’s college and high school-aged tutors reported that they are somewhat to strongly interested in pursuing a career in education, and 82% said their Step Up experience increased that interest. As one tutor shared: “Step Up confirmed my desire to go into teaching. I wasn’t sure before, but working with my student has been the most fulfilling part of my week.”

Second, require tutoring experience as a core component of teacher preparation. Many aspiring teachers enrolled in prep programs don’t have an opportunity to regularly practice what they learn until a culminating student teaching experience or a year-long residency near the end of their program. Tutoring can be the lab where theory meets practice earlier in their preparation, allowing candidates to begin working directly with students to practice instructional skills and identify and use high-quality instructional materials in real time.

Deans for Impact’s partnerships with nearly 300 prep programs demonstrate that aspiring teachers grow more skilled, confident and effective when they have structured opportunities to engage in on-the-job learning early and often. Through a pilot designed to prepare aspiring-teacher tutors to identify and effectively use high quality materials, there was an average 20-plus percentage-point growth in instructional skills and knowledge among participants. Findings also showed an average overall increase of over 49% in tutors’ feelings of preparedness to teach.

When tutoring is embedded into preparation, and not treated as an add-on, aspiring educators build instructional skills earlier, with support, before stepping into the complexity of full-classroom teaching. Districts gain a steadier, stronger pipeline. And states produce teachers who know how to accelerate learning from day one.

There is another reason to be optimistic about the effectiveness of these novice tutors. Increasingly, AI-powered tools can provide real-time instructional guidance, helping tutors decide what to teach, how to explain concepts and how to respond when students struggle. This is not about replacing the human relationship at the center of effective tutoring; it is about ensuring that every willing tutor, regardless of prior experience, can deliver consistent, high-quality instruction.

If we act on these two priorities — unlocking Work-Study funding and embedding tutoring in teacher preparation — we can solve two critical problems at once. Students gain the academic support and human relationships they desperately need. And more young adults can build their confidence and skills in teaching from the start. In the process, they establish a habit of service that will shape the rest of their careers.

Despite the sunset of ESSER funds, the federal government has continued to foster momentum by elevating tutoring as a priority in existing and future grant competitions. In December 2025, the U.S. Department of Education awarded $256 million via the to scale tutoring and improve literacy. Also in December, a growing bipartisan, bicameral coalition of Congressional leaders re-introduced the PATHS to Tutor Act to scale local partnerships working to embed tutoring into teacher training. 

But the next step must be bolder: we need a comprehensive, national strategy that integrates tutoring into the fabric of teacher preparation and channels federal dollars toward improving academic outcomes while simultaneously cultivating the next generation of educators. 

Unacceptably high numbers of students are testing below state standards, 50% in reading and more than 60% in math, according to state assessment data from the California Department of Education. Chronic absenteeism, while improving from pandemic peaks, remains well above pre-2020 levels in many districts. At the same time, school systems continue to teacher shortages and high early-career attrition.

Federal relief funds temporarily expanded tutoring and student support programs. But those dollars have largely expired. District leaders are now tasked with advancing academic recovery while operating in a far more constrained fiscal environment.

The question facing policymakers and superintendents is not whether students need more support. It is how to provide that support sustainably, without further overburdening teachers and budgets.

One statewide model offers an effective answer: the .

The network is a coalition of 14 AmeriCorps programs operating in more than 30 communities, from Sacramento to San Diego and Fresno to El Centro, with a presence at more than 200 schools and youth programs. The network recruits, trains and places full- and part-time student success coaches directly in K–12 public schools.

These coaches are near-peer mentors and tutors. They’re typically recent high school or college graduates between the ages of 18 and 25 exploring careers in education and youth development or simply looking for what’s next in their lives.

Applicants are recruited locally and through higher education collaborations such as California Community Colleges. They undergo screening, interviews and background checks consistent with AmeriCorps requirements. Before entering schools, they receive training in tutoring strategies, relationship-building and student engagement.

Unlike short-term volunteers, the coaches are embedded on campus to become a part of the school community, not just a periodic guest. During their time of service, typically a full school year, they provide targeted, evidence-based support aligned with school priorities directly in the classroom. That can include one-on-one and small-group tutoring,. attendance support and family communication support, academic mentoring and goal setting and social-emotional skill reinforcement.

Coaches can be directed to provide priority support to students who are identified by school staff based on academic performance, attendance patterns or other indicators.

This model is built upon a strong body of research demonstrating that high-impact tutoring and consistent mentoring relationships can improve engagement and accelerate academic gains. A landmark meta-analysis of found that tutoring is one of the “most versatile and potentially transformative educational tools” for substantial learning gains across grade levels.

Of course, coaches do not replace teachers, but they vitally extend classroom capacity, augment the learning environment and allow teachers to focus on core instruction. 

While AmeriCorps programs like this have existed for decades, the Student Success Coach Learning Network was created with intent to make a larger impact through the power of collaboration, information and resource sharing, and advocacy. The metrics support the efficacy of the efforts.

Across participating SSCLN programs in the 2023 and 2024 school years:

• 73% of students supported by Student Success Coaches improved their semester grades.
• 77% improved their grades over the full academic year.
• 95% of students served graduated from high school, compared with California’s statewide graduation rate of 87%.

Additionally, organizations within the network reported positive improvements in strengthening attendance efforts including reduced absenteeism and increased days attended, with two specific organizations showing an average 56% improvement in attendance-related measures. 

These results are consistent with national findings. A nationally representative survey of K–12 principals conducted by the at Johns Hopkins University found that schools providing people-powered, evidence-based supports such as tutoring report measurable improvements in attendance and academic engagement.

For district leaders, the takeaway is straightforward: Additional trained adults embedded daily in schools help students stay on track.

Roughly 36% of student success coaches through this network pursue careers in education following their service year. A year spent working alongside teachers, students and families provides hands-on experience, professional mentorship and a bridge into teaching with a realistic view of classroom life.

This matters in a state where teacher shortages remain particularly acute in some communities.

The workforce implications extend beyond education. Research from , analyzing millions of job postings, found that seven of the 10 most in-demand skills are “durable skills,” including communication, teamwork, empathy and adaptability. Coaches practice these competencies daily as they collaborate with educators, communicate with families, and navigate complex student needs. In that sense, the model addresses two policy priorities simultaneously: student recovery and American workforce development overall.

Because AmeriCorps members receive a living allowance and a help paying off student loans or graduate school tuition through state and federal investment, districts can expand student support capacity with modest local contributions.

This structure offers flexibility as districts add educator capacity without committing to permanent staff positions that may be difficult to sustain during budget downturns. That can extend classroom capacity for students and strengthen a pipeline of future educators.

The impact is people helping people. Young adults are choosing to serve in support of students who might have looked a lot like them just a few short years earlier. They are supporting a teacher who may just need that extra hand and energy they gain through teamwork. And students gain access to a personal mentor whose support may just change their education trajectory. 

As California looks ahead to future budget cycles and leadership transitions, the question is not whether the state can afford to invest in coordinated, people-powered student supports.

It is whether it can afford not to.

It turns out, of course, that I am far from alone. 

Participation in tutoring grew by five percentage points (from 19% to 24%) between 2024 and 2025, according to the newly released 2nd Edition of The State of Educational Opportunity in America: A Survey of 23,000 Parents, from 50CAN and Edge Research. In the notoriously slow-moving U.S. education system, this is a sea-change. In urban areas, the rates are still higher, with nearly one-third of parents reporting that their child attends tutoring. 

Tutoring has long been the primary academic response of wealthy families across the United States when their children need additional support. Yet, the survey found that this too is shifting. While tutoring among high-income families increased one point from 28% to 29%, among low-income families there was a  five-point increase, cutting the access gap between low- and high-income families substantially. Indeed, at this point, you’d be hard pressed to go into any school, public or private, and not find children who attend academic tutoring outside of school. Tutoring is becoming the go-to tool for parents at all income levels and across all demographic groups. 

What would it take to make tutoring truly universal? The main barrier is expense, with 30% of parents whose children are not in tutoring saying that it’s too expensive. Cost is likely also the reason that students in private school participate in tutoring at much higher rates than their peers in public schools. A second barrier to tutoring is access. For the students getting the worst grades, 26%of parents also said that tutoring is not available in their community. 

My daughter is fortunate: I have the means to pay for tutoring, and I live in a suburban community with numerous tutoring centers. Like me, D.C. Public Schools principal Katreena Shelby had turned to private math tutoring when her daughter needed help. After seeing how quickly her daughter got back on track, she started wondering if she could get this same kind of help for her public middle school students. “I had the means to pay for my daughter to get tutoring,” Shelby told me. “Yet I wasn’t prioritizing the budget I had control over to get my students this same kind of support.” Shelby is one of thousands of principals who, in the wake of the pandemic, embraced tutoring. 

Spending two years researching the emergence of this new wave of high-impact tutoring for my book The Future of Tutoring, I’ve seen firsthand how students, teachers, school leaders and parents alike get excited when they are able to provide personalized support to struggling students. Tutoring is endlessly flexible; successful tutoring has taken place for early literacy in kindergarten, fourth-grade math skills, middle grades reading, ninth-grade Algebra I, required high school exit exams and more. Public schools have found ways to provide the very service that so many parents seek outside of school — a trusted adult who regularly meets with a small group of children, understands the progress they need to make and builds a relationship with them to not only help them learn but help them want to learn. 

While the initial groundswell of high-impact tutoring fueled by federal COVID dollars has dissipated, there are states and districts continuing to provide publicly-funded tutoring. Cities like Nashville and the District of Columbia are staying the course with tutoring programs that launched in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, while other cities like Philadelphia are trying to get new tutoring efforts off the ground now. 

Louisiana has led the way for states, with state budget investments of $30 million annually to support tutoring for students below grade-level that is now required by legislation. Massachusetts is in the first year of implementing for struggling students in grades K-3, funded by a $25 million annual state budget allocation. Ohio’s state Senate passed at the end of 2025, which, if enacted, will require high-impact tutoring for students performing below grade-level in math. 

The good news from the State of Educational Opportunity survey is that a majority of parents strongly favor public funding that provides access to free tutoring for K-12 students who fall below grade level. In fact, of the nine policy proposals that parents were asked about in the survey, public funding for tutoring ranked first with 86% of parents supporting the idea. 

Tutoring is equally popular on both sides of the aisle, the survey reveals, and that popularity holds in every single state across the country. From a low of 79% support in Vermont to a high of 92% support in D.C., it’s clear that parents across the country want every child who needs help to receive that help, paid for by public dollars. 

In a country that seems increasingly pitted against itself, tutoring is one of the last remaining policies that has a chance to pull us back together. Parents in rural, urban, red, blue, east and west America know their child’s future rests on a quality education. What we learn from this new survey is that more than three-quarters of parents in every state want this for every child, not only their own. It is time that policymakers take up this charge from their voters and make 2026 the year that tutoring becomes a permanent part of the American educational experience. 

I knew them both as education reformers and my board members as I began my career in education policy. I learned as much from what they said as from what they left unsaid. And I knew it was their and other board members’ curiosity and willingness to work with strange bedfellows to reach shared goals, that powered what many remember as the state’s golden age of reform. Those were efforts, and times, to be proud of.

I thought of the bishop, the Congressman and their political collaboration to improve education when I reviewed the results of the 2nd Edition of the Educational Opportunity in America Survey from 50CAN and Edge Research, where we asked over 23,000 American families a range of questions not just about their educational preferences, but about their experiences navigating our education system. In the era of increased partisanship and “enragement is engagement” algorithms, several of the results were fascinating not just for what they expose about family preferences, but for the complicated coalitions they reveal, which could be necessary to drive the next phase of education policy change.

In advocacy, lukewarm support for a policy doesn’t get you very far. The parents who show up are the ones who say they “strongly favor” — not just “favor” — an idea. Using that high bar, let’s look at what the survey reveals. There is strong support on the issue of whether or not states should provide free tutoring to students, with 54% of Republican parents (the lowest) strongly supporting the issue and 73% of parents identifying as members of the DSA/Green party (the highest) strongly supporting it, as well. 

Free summer camp, similarly, features strong support with 47% of Republicans, 50% of Libertarians and Independents, 63% of Democrats, and 78% of DSA/Green party respondents strongly favoring the idea. Open enrollment also enjoys fairly uniform support across the survey with between 44% of Independents and 53% of Libertarians strongly favoring letting students attend the public school of their choice. 

One might argue that tutoring, summer camp, and open enrollment are relatively anodyne and should enjoy an easy path to victory. Certainly their cross partisan endorsement creates a good base for policy change. But it’s worth noting that — in this age when no political party has close to majority support from parents — even for these popular issues to get a majority of parental support we need to reach across the aisle. 

According to Gallup, in their most just 27% of American adults consider themselves Democrats, and the same percentage consider themselves Republicans. So that 63% of Democrats who support free summer camp is only about 17% of all parents. Only by bringing in Republicans and Independents do you get back to a majority of all parents strongly in favor of the idea. 

For other issues, the logic of strange bedfellows is even stronger. When asked about the hot-button topic du jour of education savings accounts, the highest support was found among DSA/Green respondents, with 57% strongly favoring, with Libertarians and Independents bringing up the rear at 43% jointly. Charter schools, conversely, get their strongest support, at 44%, from Libertarians with all other groups between 34% ofIndependents and 38% of Republicans. Supporters of these issues can’t afford to turn anyone away. 

So what can be gleaned from this data that might help in pursuing future policy change?

First, strange bedfellows will be the norm as building a diverse constituency, when no single party can guarantee success, will require new alliances with different political alignments. Second, it will require focus and issue discipline that allows groups to support the same policy for completely different reasons. And lastly, it will necessitate a dealmaking pragmatism that allows for the packaging of issues in unexpected ways. If you care about the future of ESAs, for instance, you might want to pair it with free tutoring or free summer camp to build a broader base of support. Politics is, after all, about addition.

The good thing is that we have some striking examples of this pragmatic approach to politics in action. They include Louisiana with its Steve Carter Education Program — part of the state’s larger tutoring initiative passed alongside its GATOR ESA — Massachusetts for early literacy efforts and New Jersey with its state funded Tutoring Corps; these programs ensure more students who need tutoring receive it. Arizona used its COVID relief funds during a Republican administration to run its sweeping AZ on Track Summer camp program. And Arkansas, Idaho, Nevada, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kansas under Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly have all recently enacted open enrollment laws. 

ESA-like policies, which by some reports half of the nation’s children are now eligible to participate in, have been the shark allowing other policies to come along for the ride like a remora. Utah and Arkansas, for instance, added significant funds to raise teacher salaries when passing their ESA laws; Arizona did so separately. Texas — because everything is larger there -– increased public school funding by $8.5 billion,$4 billion of which was for teacher salary increases, when it passed its $1 billion ESA last year.Ěý

Arkansas also adopted the science of reading and eliminated its charter cap in the process. Indeed, there are many good examples already that show an education strategy that aligns interests of seemingly disparate groups and with popular or unexpected issues is an effective one. When it comes to the politics of education reform, more may indeed be more. 

With all of this offered, the question left for us may be: In this age of stark differences can we really focus on the areas of agreement with people we may otherwise oppose? I suspect Bishop Jackson and Congressman Zimmer asked themselves these same questions before stepping forward to lead their state’s ed reform coalition of the time. Those differences never stopped them. And they shouldn’t stop us either.

But new studies bolster the evidence that done well, virtual models can be just as effective at moving students forward as face-to-face instruction.

In Massachusetts, first graders who spent 15 minutes a day online with a tutor from stayed on track a year later without additional tutoring, according to exclusively with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. Students gained, on average, at least five additional months of learning over their expected growth. 

Another virtual program, , produced positive results for the lowest-performing students in the Kansas City, Missouri, schools. Students who received one-on-one tutoring from certified teachers made greater progress than those who didn’t receive the extra help, .Ěý

“Virtual models are getting stronger,” said Amanda Neitzel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the Ignite Reading study. “If you go back just a few years, we had no examples of evidence-proven models and now we are getting them.”

In addition to following Ignite Reading for two years, she recently published a study showing that elementary school students in Texas and Louisiana who received virtual tutoring from , outperformed their peers and gained nearly three additional months of learning.

Results like those have broadened the conversation about how to bring students who are missing critical reading skills up to speed. 

“Tutoring can work in many ways and in different settings,” Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, said earlier this month at the nonprofit’s annual conference. 

When the organization began funding tutoring research four years ago, there were doubts, he said, about whether virtual programs could compete with in-person models. There’s more confidence in online versions now, but as with tutoring in general, progress depends on whether providers feature the components of a high-dosage program — meaning they were offered for roughly 90 minutes a week, during the school day with a trained tutor. Ensuring kids get all the tutoring hours a program is designed to deliver is also key.

“We obsess over student attendance,” said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, Ignite Reading’s founder. Now in 24 states, the program focuses on building phonics skills and reading fluency.

In the Johns Hopkins Ignite Reading study, which focused on 13 Massachusetts school districts, 85% of students who mastered foundational reading skills “during the crucial first grade window” were still keeping up at the end of second grade, Neitzel wrote. But if students didn’t meet expectations on time, they couldn’t catch up. Some were just too far behind.

“Many kids start our program still not knowing basic kindergarten skills, like letter names and sounds,” Sliwerski said. That means tutors have two years of content to get through.

To Sliwerski, the findings demonstrate that third grade, when many states decide whether students are strong enough readers to advance, is too late to intervene. If kids struggle to decode unfamiliar words, they won’t be able to comprehend more complex reading assignments. 

“We are so caught up in ‘reading by grade three’ that we aren’t honoring that kids are actually supposed to have fully cracked the code and be able to fluently read grade-level text at the end of first grade,” she said. “We act like kids have all the time in the world, when they don’t.” 

The 5,700-student Chelsea Public Schools was among the Massachusetts districts using Ignite Reading as part of a project funded by One8, a nonprofit that helped schools get high-dosage tutoring off the ground. The state the program.  

At first, “our teachers were a little skeptical,” said Superintendent Almi Abeyta, a former kindergarten and first grade teacher. “They were like, ‘We just got off of remote learning. Why are we going to put kids on a computer again?’ ” 

Then they saw the data. Students made similar gains on DIBELS, a widely used early literacy assessment, whether they were Black, Hispanic, English learners or had a disability, the study found.

‘A great opportunity’

Results like those are why the Fallbrook Union Elementary School District, near San Diego, California, is now spreading the program to all of its elementary schools as part of its First Grade Promise initiative. 

In a pilot, Fallbrook STEM Academy, which serves a high-poverty population, enrolled 20 second graders in the program. Many of the students speak Spanish at home, didn’t attend preschool and lack access to books, flash cards and other early reading materials, said Principal Ana Arias. She called each parent to ask that they get their children to school a little early so they could meet with a tutor.

“I phrased it as an opportunity — a great opportunity — but I needed their commitment,” Arias said. â€œWe have so many kids in the classroom and there’s so much need. It’s very rare to have a teacher meet one-on-one with a student every single day.” 

At the beginning of this school year, the 20 students were reading at a kindergarten level. By November, 19 had advanced to a first grade level, and she’s hoping they’ll be on par with their peers by the end of the school year. 

‘Transcend time zones’ 

The latest findings build on those that Harvard University and City University of New York researchers published last year. Whether tutoring is remote or in-person, , matters less than whether the tutor is well qualified and students attend sessions regularly.

Virtual models even have some advantages over in-person programs, experts say. Schools have to pay an in-person tutor whether or not the student is present. But virtual programs “transcend time zones,” Sliwerski said, and can redeploy a tutor to meet with another student.  

If the tutor is absent, “we have a substitute ready to go,” she said. “The technology underpinning the program ensures the child receives the exact lesson they were supposed to get.”

In Kansas City, consistency was key to the strong results. Students in first through fourth grade across 14 schools met with their tutors for 30-minute sessions at least three times a week for 20 weeks during the 2024-25 school year. The more sessions completed, the stronger the growth. Some students gained more than two months of additional learning and were less likely to be placed in special education. 

On average, the students who participated in the Hoot program and those in the comparison group began the school year two grade levels behind. While many are still struggling readers, their progress was significant, said Carly Robinson, a senior researcher at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.

“This wasn’t a boutique pilot,” she said. “It’s tutoring operating inside a district system that is messy, and it still proved to be effective.”

The district had to contend with technical glitches and unexpected snow days that forced students to miss some sessions.

Not all virtual programs have been able to overcome disruptions. 

In a large suburban district in Texas, some students meeting with virtual tutors during the 2021-22 school year did worse in reading than their peers who didn’t receive the intervention. Scheduling conflicts, like school assemblies, and tutor turnover, contributed to the disappointing results.

‘A higher bar’

Those challenges grow even more complex in the middle grades with electives and block schedules where students don’t have the same classes every day. But Rahul Kalita, co-founder of Tutored by Teachers, said maintaining relationships between tutors and students is essential. 

He hopes to contribute to the research base on virtual tutoring by participating in a randomized controlled study, funded by Accelerate and focused on math in two large Indianapolis middle schools. 

“It felt like the right opportunity to test our model under a higher bar of rigor,” he said.

On top of virtual programs refining their practices, districts, he said, “have also become more sophisticated buyers of tutoring.” Multiple districts across the country pay providers higher rates if students make measurable progress or pass state tests. 

In addition, there’s growing agreement that literacy tutoring, whether virtual or not, is more effective if it’s part of a strong early reading program that includes a curriculum based on the science of reading and screening students for dyslexia or other learning difficulties. 

“You can’t throw tutoring at the problem,” Sliwerski said at the Accelerate conference. “It has to be part of a very intentional system.”

Created through a partnership between 50CAN and Edge Research, captures the views of more than 23,000 parents across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., building on the more than 20,000 parents surveyed in summer 2024. What we found is an education system that is being remade for the better by making available to more families the experiences traditionally reserved for the wealthiest among us. 

That starts with schooling. Historically in America, the wealthy have taken advantage of the range of choices in schools that their resources have unlocked while most families had to make do with only one option. But with the huge expansion of school choice programs over the past few years, more working- and middle-class families are getting to take control of their child’s education and it shows: the percentage of parents who say they feel like they have a choice in what school their child attends is up five points from 65% to 70%. 

In sync with this shift, we also found that the percentage of parents who say, if they had to do it over again, they would send their child to the school they go to today also rose, climbing four points from 64% to 68%. Finally, the percentage of parents reporting they are very satisfied with their child’s school rose two points, and the percentage reporting they are very satisfied with the emotional and mental health their child receives at school rose four points. 

Another point of real progress since 2024 is in high school students’ participation in career pathways. Children of the well-off have traditionally had a leg up in this area but through leadership at the state and local level, more opportunities are being made available to more children of all walks of life. 

The number of families who say their child is participating in pathway programs climbed across the board: Participation in dual enrollment courses, CTE programs and industry certifications are all up three points while internships and apprenticeships jumped six points. At the same time, we found an increase in demand for these programs, ranging from two to five points, among those who do not currently have a child enrolled, suggesting demand for future growth on the horizon. 

Tutoring represents a third area of promising growth. When the children of the wealthy fall behind, they have always known they can get their child the help they need to catch back up. Now that same resource is reaching more students regardless of income. Overall, the percentage of children who received tutoring in the past year increased five points from 19% to 24%. At the same time, the gap in tutoring between low-income children and high-income children decreased from 12 points to just eight points. 

Will these trends continue? They will if parents have anything to say about it. We found that 86% of parents favored free tutoring for any K-12 student who falls behind, 80% favored free summer camp for all K-12 students, 77% favored open enrollment so any student can transfer to the public school of their choice and 77% also favored universal ESAs, where any parent can use a government savings account to pay for everything from tutoring to textbooks to tuition. 

Now it’s up to education advocates and policymakers to look past the gloom in the daily headlines and recognize the opportunity this moment represents. We have emerged from the pandemic with a stronger sense of purpose around the ways education needs to change. We have seen those changes taking root in states around the country. And it is clear that parents of all political stripes want us to go further to make these initial steps a permanent part of the American educational landscape. 

We have an opportunity to secure the policy wins this year that will get headlines for all the right reasons by focusing less on ideological battles and more on the practical changes that will improve students’ lives.

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. 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.”

On a chilly morning at Leonard Flynn Elementary School, first graders played with jump ropes and hula hoops outside while reading tutor Lillie Reynaga set up her materials at a table in the hallway nearby. One by one, kindergarteners came to her table and practiced blending sounds to make one-syllable words.

“We’re going to make words and they’re all going to rhyme because they’ll all end with at,” Reynaga told 5-year-old Violet, who kicked her legs back and forth on the low bench. 

For the next 15 minutes Violet repeated at-at-at and read mat, rat and fat.

“Now, do you have any guesses and what S and at come together to say?”

“Sat!” Violet called out.

“How did you know that this word is sat?”

“Because it starts with s!” 

The benefits of high-impact tutoring are on full display at this Spanish immersion public school on the edge of San Francisco’s Bernal Heights and Mission District neighborhoods. Flynn introduced the program last year and saw almost immediate results.

Among the second graders who received tutoring in first grade, nearly a third started this school year reading at grade level or above, while more than half of students who did not work with tutors last year started second grade reading at a kindergarten level.

This year, those second graders are getting the support they missed out on in first grade, along with other Flynn students from kindergarten through third grade. Tutors trained and paid by provider Chapter One visit Flynn every day to deliver short bursts of high-impact tutoring in word recognition and language comprehension.

It’s not the first reading intervention Flynn has tried, said principal Tyler Woods, but it’s having the most impact.

“Literacy interventionists would provide intensive interventions but only serve 20 or 30 students across the school,” he said. “This is a lighter touch but focused on the areas that we know our kids really struggle with, and it just reaches a lot more students.”

High-impact tutoring — a intervention characterized by its frequency, duration and alignment with school curriculum — has been so successful in San Francisco that district officials recently expanded the program to serve more than 2,700 students across 20 priority district schools. 

“This is the single most effective literacy intervention we have,” said Ann Levy Walden, CEO of the San Francisco Education Fund, which helps to fund and implement the program in partnership with the school district. “This expansion allows us to do what we know works.”

Nearly half of students in San Francisco Unified schools . A year ago, the district set a goal that specifically targets third grade proficiency: By 2027, 70% of third graders will meet state standards, up from 52% in 2022. High-impact tutoring is one of the targeted supports the district is using to meet the benchmark.

“Ensuring students are proficient readers by the end of third grade is one of our most important student outcome goals,” said district superintendent Maria Su. The district also adopted a curriculum based on the science of reading last year — the first reading curriculum change in the district in a decade. This change, along with expanding tutoring, are meant to help “focus resources on the grade levels and school communities where high-impact tutoring can most effectively accelerate literacy development,” Su said.

The cost of high-impact tutoring is $500 a student, which includes up to four sessions a week, assessments, individualized tutoring plans, progress monitoring and integration with classroom instruction. The Education Fund raises money continuously, but a year of high-impact tutoring in San Francisco costs about $2 million. This year, the district contributed $830,000. 

The district expanded high-impact tutoring after seeing results last year. After working with Chapter One tutors for five months last year, the number of students district-wide who met grade-level reading standards more than doubled, from 24% to 54%. At Sanchez Elementary in the Mission District first graders reading at or above grade level went from 15% to 59%.

At Guadalupe Elementary, in the city’s Crocker-Amazon neighborhood, the share of kindergarteners reading at grade level jumped from 39% to nearly 68%, after students participated in the tutoring program.

“It’s an early literacy gain that we have never seen before,” said principal Raj Sharma. Nearly 70% of students at Guadalupe are English learners, and about 10% are newcomers to the United States, Sharma said. “Sometimes our students don’t have any school experience at all.” 

Sharma said he specifically chose to bring high-impact tutors in to work with very young students because he believed the impact for them could be so substantial. 

“Once your foundation is strong, you can build the house on there,” he said. “Family or socio-economic status matters, but in our situation we saw that it’s beyond that. We can make a difference.”

A big challenge for school leaders is how and when to connect tutors with students. At Guadalupe, tutors meet with every student in a class either individually or in small groups in their classrooms. This approach is less disruptive for students, Sharma said, and allows for more continuity in their learning experience.

“They are just one of the small groups and others are with the Chapter One tutor, and then they can rotate,” he said. “They are not missing any instruction that’s given in the classroom. At the same time, they’re getting the reading foundations.”

Sharma and other principals said that the way high-impact tutoring is being delivered in San Francisco stands out, because tutors are trained and paid and because principals get help integrating the program into their schools. The San Francisco Education Fund partners with the San Francisco Literacy Coalition to help school leaders to develop schedules and determine which students will receive tutoring.

“The scheduling of it has been really seamless, which is not always the case when you’re trying to pair any type of extra support or intervention,” said Woods of Flynn Elementary. “Many of our students are needing support from the moment they join our school and in the past, we just haven’t had the scope of support to provide some meaningful development. This is third time we’ve been able to say, let’s figure out who needs the intervention and everybody gets it.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified a literacy organization. It is the San Francisco Literacy Coalition.

And while just 19 states now offer taxpayer-supported , which allow families to spend public funds on the school or program of their choice, the policy has a growing constituency: Nearly half of parents strongly support it. 

Meanwhile, the constituency for annual testing is withering, with just 29% of parents saying they strongly support it.

The new revelations come from the second edition of , conducted by the policy group 50CAN, which operates chapters in 12 states. It surveyed parents in 50 states and Washington, D.C., and found small but significant improvements across five key educational areas, including satisfaction with school quality and student mental health support.Ěý

The findings paint a slightly different picture than the one we’re accustomed to seeing in accounts of crowding into school board meetings: 47% of parents now say they’re very satisfied with their child’s school, up from 45% in 2024. Satisfaction by low-income parents jumped five points, from 41% to 46%. 

Likewise, 41% are very satisfied with the kind of emotional and mental health support their children get at school, up four points from last year, with significant gains in critical transition grades such as sixth and ninth grade, both up about five percentage points. 

“Overall, my takeaway is we shouldn’t get distracted by all the headlines, all the crazy stuff going on in the world,” said Marc Porter Magee, 50CAN’s founder. “We have a very reasonable shot at making education better in ways that will meaningfully improve kids’ lives. We’re generally heading in the right direction.”

Among the findings: 

• Participation in tutoring rose from 19% to 24%, with the income gap nearly cut in half, from nine percentage points to five, but low-income families still struggle to get their kids tutoring, largely because of cost and transportation;
• 86% of parents now favor free tutoring, while 80% support free summer camps; 77% back open enrollment and universal ESAs;
• 49% of parents want their children to get a four-year degree, but only 38% believe it’ll happen, with college affordability a huge sticking point; 
• While more high-income children participated in summer camp, overall participation dropped two percentage points; among low-income kids, it dropped three points; kids from high-income families are now twice as likely to attend, 61% vs 27%.

On the summer camp statistics, Porter Magee said, “My takeaway from that is there’s still a need, and high-income families are really leaning into that. But low-income families are getting hit with affordability.”

Responding to the findings, Keri Rodrigues, president of the , said, “Parents are fighting for a school that works for their kid, but when higher-income families can buy tutoring and summer learning while everyone else gets waitlists and paperwork, that’s not choice, it’s rationing.”

She noted that the union’s polling shows that just 48% of public school parents say their child is “definitely academically prepared for next year”; 31% say schools didn’t even tell them what skills their child needs.

As for satisfaction with mental health support, a 2024 found that 65% give schools an “A” or “B,” but that 31% give schools a “C” or worse. 

She said her group’s findings on parents’ priorities are clear: “Make tutoring, mental health supports, and quality learning time universal and easy to access, especially for low-income families. If we’re serious about outcomes, we have to be serious about access.”

ESA support rising across political lines

Among the most significant findings, parents across the political spectrum are now increasingly interested in ESAs — 46% of Republicans, 49% of Democrats and 43% of Libertarians and Independents say they “strongly support” the idea, and among self-described members of the Green Party or , support climbs higher, to 57%. In most state-level debates on ESAs, political conservatives are their biggest supporters.

ESAs, as well as open-enrollment policies, which allows students to attend the public school of their choice, now command more support than charter schools, and by a wide margin: 46% to 36%.

Porter Magee said ESAs merit attention as an “anti-majoritarian” school choice policy that appeals to many different kinds of parents, for different reasons.

“If you’re on the far left, you probably don’t feel like your traditional public school and school district represents you and your values perfectly,” he said. “And it’s the same when you’re on the far right. A lot of times, the people who are most attached to traditional school districts are moderates — wealthy, suburban moderates. So it kind of does make sense.” 

Porter Magee said he knows of no other parent polls that break out political beliefs like this, suggesting that conservative policymakers who favor ESAs and other school choice proposals should consider “a strange-bedfellow strategy” that invites Green and DSA-aligned parents. “Maybe they are better allies on some of these issues than we think.”

More broadly, he said, “We should not be writing off the left or the right when we’re trying to figure out the coalition that would actually pass these things.”

Kids who are ‘just not doing a lot’

The survey also broke out responses by about 1,000 parents who are K-12 teachers. It found that they’re significantly more likely to be very satisfied with their children’s school, and that their kids participate in summer programs, sports, community service, dual enrollment, and Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses at higher rates. “They’re just more engaged,” Porter Magee said. “They’re getting more out of their time as students.”

Asked about their children’s grades, parents with kids who get mostly A’s reported that their children were more likely to do 30 minutes or more of homework, spend time with friends in person and read for fun — “all the things we want them to do,” Porter Magee said. D and F students were more likely to play video games, scroll on their phones and access social media, their parents say. 

They also drop out of sports at higher rates, he said. “They’re just not doing a lot.” 

The difference between how “A” and “D” students spend their time isn’t generally addressed in public policy, he said, “partially because we haven’t had the data, partially because we don’t know what to do about it. But I do think it’s an issue, and I think parents see it as an issue.” 

Overall, Porter Magee said, the main finding from the survey is one of slow, incremental progress for kids, whose parents now feel that they have greater access to different kinds of opportunities. But the fact that much of that progress is largely enjoyed by high- and middle-income parents, he said, is problematic.

“How would you create the public systems to make a more equal world, where all of those opportunities are available to everyone?” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to do, and [what] the survey is helping us track.”

High-quality tutoring has emerged as an important post-pandemic for helping struggling students in public schools. finds that tutoring often results in substantial additional learning gains when delivered during the school day, in small groups with the same tutors and multiple times a week for at least 10 weeks. 

But this often comes with a substantial price tag — depending on the model and staffing approach, can range from $1,200 to $2,500 per student per year. During the pandemic, many districts relied on federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds to launch or expand tutoring programs, but these have largely expired.

Fortunately, states and school districts have access to other funding streams, which can be combined through “blending” and “braiding” to cover the costs of tutoring when a single source is insufficient.

Federal Funding 

Though federal funding faced significant uncertainty during the Fiscal Year 2026 budget process, Congress passed a spending package that sustains many of these funding streams, at least for the coming year. 

School districts may use Elementary and Secondary Education Act funds — federal aid intended to close achievement gaps for low-income students — for schoolwide or targeted tutoring programs, depending on a school’s poverty level. ESEA funds, which support the recruitment, training and retention of effective educators, can be used to train staff as tutors and provide stipends to those who take on this additional responsibility. ESEA fund student support, academic enrichment and afterschool programs, which includes tutoring. 

Other federal funds may be used for tutoring programs that aid certain student groups. ESEA funds can be used to train and pay tutors of English learners and Native American and Alaska Native students, respectively. And the can cover the cost of tutoring, instructional materials and tutor professional development when these services are tied to a student’s Individualized Education Program.

Beyond direct funding, districts can leverage federally supported service and employment programs. AmeriCorps, a national service initiative funded primarily through federal appropriations, has long supplied tutors to low-income districts and schools through full-time programs like City Year. And the federal work-study program helps pay part-time salaries for college undergraduates and graduate students, including those who tutor in K-12 schools. 

Finally, the U.S. Department of Education has ĚýžąłŮ˛őĚý, a regulatory framework for discretionary grant competitions. This emphasis aligns with the department’s Fiscal Year 2025 literacy grants, which include roughly $89 million recently awarded to seven state education agencies to scale tutoring programs.

State and Local Funding

are playing a pivotal role in sustaining and scaling tutoring programs launched with federal ESSER funds by using funding formulas, policy mandates and infrastructure supports to keep post-pandemic initiatives going. 

Many states have relied on short-term appropriations. Louisiana, for example, paired a K-5 tutoring for low-performing students with an initial appropriation in the 2024-25 school year and another $30 million in 2025-26, though future funding will depend on annual legislative approval. 

And while most state tutoring investments have been one-time commitments, stands out for embedding tutoring in its K-12 funding formula by providing an additional $500 per fourth-grader each year for literacy tutoring.  

Some states have enacted tutoring mandates without funding them. , for example, requires that students in grades 3 to 8 who failed the state assessment the previous year receive tutoring, but districts must use a combination of state, federal and local funds to pay for it. Twenty-four states offer , such as vendor lists or other procurement assistance.

A smaller number of states have statewide programs that recruit, train and place members of their tutors corps in schools. In , this operates through a nonprofit model backed by and philanthropy. The is embedded within the state education department and relies on a combination of expiring federal relief funds and funds from local foundations, nonprofits and city governments.

Districts, cities and counties sometimes offer competitive grants that can fund tutoring, and superintendents can reallocate existing dollars for tutoring through their districts’ annual budget process. In cities with strong mayoral involvement in education, tutoring dollars can be allocated directly through the city budget, as the leaders of ., and have done. 

Higher Education Partnerships

Colleges and universities represent a large, often underused source of potential low-cost tutors. In a 2023 , then-Secretary of Education Miguel A. Cardona encouraged cross-sector partnerships to scale tutoring and highlighted federal work-study as a key resource. The letter noted that when eligible college students tutored school-aged children, the government could cover up to 100% of their wages through federal work-study. That guidance remains in effect, and there have been no subsequent regulatory changes to the program.

Teacher-preparation programs are also well positioned to expand tutoring capacity. At for example, undergraduate education majors are required to serve as tutors in local elementary schools as part of their coursework. Although the tutors are unpaid, their work counts toward their field-placement hours for graduation, giving them more than required by the state. There is no cost for participating public schools. The model enables districts to sustain tutoring at little to no cost, while future teachers gain valuable classroom experience. 

Leveraging Philanthropic and Nonprofit Support 

School districts can also partner with philanthropic and nonprofit organizations. The , launched as a public-private partnership during the Biden administration and now operating independently, offers free and connects districts with vetted providers of staffing, training and financial assistance for tutors, helping to reduce hiring, training and program startup costs.

The upshot is that there are more sources of support for intensive tutoring in public schools than one might think. Tapping them may require education policymakers and practitioners to move money from other programs. But with a large body of research showing increased and meaningful learning gains from high-quality tutoring done during the school day, that shouldn’t be a difficult decision to make.

The results could open a new front in the evolving discussion over how to use AI in schools — and how closely humans must watch it when it’s interacting with kids.

In a involving 165 British secondary school students, ages 13–15, the ed-tech startup put a small group of expert human tutors in charge of a , or LLM, offered by Google’s . As it tutored students on math problems via Eedi’s platform, it drafted replies when students needed help. Before the messages went out, the human tutors got a chance to revise each one to the point where they’d feel comfortable sending it themselves.

Students didn’t know whether they were talking to a human or a chatbot, but they had longer conversations, on average, with the “supervised” AI/human combination than simply with a human tutor, said Bibi Groot, Eedi’s chief impact officer. 

In the end, students using the supervised AI tutor performed slightly better than those who chatted online via text with human tutors — they were able to solve new kinds of problems on subsequent topics successfully 66.2% of the time, compared to 60.7% with human tutors.

The AI, researchers concluded, was “a reliable source” of instruction. Human tutors approved about three out of four drafted messages with few to no edits.

Students who got both human and AI tutoring were able to correct misconceptions and offer correct answers over 90% of the time, compared to just 65% of the time when they got a “static, pre-written” response to their questions.

And the AI only “hallucinated,” or offered factual errors, 0.1% of the time — in 3,617 messages, that amounted to just five hallucinations. It didn’t produce any messages that gave the tutors pause over safety.

The results suggest that “pedagogically fine-tuned” AI could play a role in delivering effective, individualized tutoring at scale, researchers said. Interestingly, students who received support from the AI were more likely to solve new kinds of problems on subsequent topics. 

The key to the AI’s success, said Groot, was that researchers gave it access to detailed, “extremely personalized” information about what topics students had covered over the previous 20 weeks. That included the topics they’d struggled with and those they’d mastered. 

“We know what topics they’re covering in the next 20 weeks — we know the curriculum. We know the other students in the classroom. We know whether they’re putting effort into their questions. We know whether they’re watching videos or not — we know so much about the student without passing any personally identifiable information to the AI.”

That guided the AI’s strategy about whether students needed an extra push or just more support — something an “out-of-the-box, vanilla LLM” can’t do, she said.

“They don’t know anything about what the teacher is teaching in the classroom,” Groot said. “They don’t know what misconceptions or what topics the students are struggling with and what they’ve already mastered, so they’re not able to dynamically change how they address the topic, as a human tutor would.”

Human tutors, she said, generally have “a really good sense of where the student struggles, because they have some sort of ongoing relation with a student most of the time. An LLM tutor generally doesn’t.”

All the same, even master tutors typically don’t go into a session knowing a student’s comprehensive history in a course, including their misconceptions about the material. “All of that is too much information for a human tutor to read up on and deal with while they’re having one conversation” with a student, Groot said.

And they’re under pressure to respond quickly “so that the student is not left waiting. And that’s quite an intensive experience for tutors that leads to a bit of cognitive overload,” she said. The AI doesn’t suffer from that. It needs less than a millisecond to read all of those contexts and come up with that first question.”

Even with their personal connection to students, human tutors can’t be available 24/7. Groot said Eedi employs about 25 tutors across several time zones who are available to students from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day, but to give students broader access would require hiring “an army of tutors,” she said.

The new findings could encourage schools to use AI as a kind of “front line” tutor, with humans intervening when a student is “derailing the conversation, or they have such a persistent misconception that the AI can’t deal with it,” said Groot. “We think that would be an interesting way to collaborate between the AI and the human, because there is still a really important role for a human tutor. But our human tutors just cannot have conversations with thousands of students at once.”

The new study, published last week on Eedi’s site and scheduled to appear in a peer-reviewed journal next year, differed in one important way from recent studies that looked at AI tutoring. Researchers at in October 2024 examined AI-assisted human tutoring, in which tutors primarily drove the conversation. But in that case, the AI acted as a kind of assistant, providing suggestions behind the scenes. In the Eedi study, it was the other way around, with AI driving the conversation and humans overseeing it.

Robin Lake, director of the at Arizona State University, said the study is important in and of itself, but also in the context of broader findings elsewhere suggesting that, with proper training and guidance, “AI can be an incredibly powerful tool — and certainly has a potential to take tutoring to scale in ways that we’ve never seen before.”

Under controlled circumstances, she said, it’s also “outperforming humans — that’s really important.”

Lake noted a from Harvard researchers that examined results from 194 undergraduates in a large physics class. They presented identical material in class and via an AI tutor and found that students learned “significantly more in less time” using the tutor. They also felt more engaged and motivated about the material.

Liz Cohen, vice president of policy for 50CAN and author of the recent book , said the study provides “valuable evidence” about new kinds of tutoring. 

But one of its limitations, she said, is that it relied on 13-to-15-year-olds. “So immediately I have a lot of questions about if the findings are applicable for younger students, especially using a chat based model,” which may not be a good one for such students.

She also noted that there are many questions around student persistence with AI tutors, including what happens when students get frustrated or aren’t sufficiently engaged in the work? 

“I still mostly think that entirely AI tutoring programs are biased towards students who want to do the work or are interested in learning,” Cohen said, “and it’s pretty easy to see that students who aren’t bought in or are frustrated are going to give up more readily with an AI tutor.”

She noted that her 12-year-old daughter has experienced problems persisting in an AI-powered math tutoring program. “She gets frustrated if she can’t get the answer and then she doesn’t want to do it anymore, so I think we need to figure out that piece of it.”

But the Trump administration’s education budget for the current fiscal year and funding legislation in the Republican-led House of Representatives would gut the federal resources that many schools are using to keep their tutoring programs alive, threats compounded by administration efforts to shrink key Department of Education offices and move them elsewhere in the federal government.

Congressional leaders in both political parties have concern about the slow recovery of student achievement post-pandemic and have tutoring as an evidence-based solution. They should be heartened that a new of school leaders by RAND and the Partnership for Student Success found that 93% of schools offering tutoring in 2024-25 served the same or more students than during the previous school year. But rather than expanding the Department of Education that states and school districts are using to fund tutoring, the president and his congressional allies have them on the chopping block. If they don’t reverse course, students are going to pay a heavy price.

Take Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the major federal K-12 education law administered by the department. This year, the program is supplying $18.4 billion to schools that have significant portions of students living in high-poverty communities or low-income households. This is the largest source of federal funding for schools, and the most flexible federal funding for tutoring programs. The House appropriations bill voted out of committee in September would cut it by 26%, or $4.7 billion.

Title II of ESEA provides funds that can be used to train teachers or other staff to serve as effective tutors and provide stipends to educators who take on additional tutoring responsibilities. The president’s budget and the House bill propose eliminating Title II entirely, a roughly $2.2 billion cut. They would also end all $890 million in funding for Title III, which schools and districts can use to pay and train tutors providing supplemental assistance to English learners. 

Title IV, Parts A and B fund tutoring during and after school. The president’s budget would eliminate this $2.7 billion program, as well as $220 million that districts receive through the federal Rural Education Achievement Program, which can be used to hire tutors.

Proposed cuts in higher education programs would also undermine tutoring in the nation’s schools.

Colleges and universities can use federal funds to cover of the wages of students employed as reading or math tutors for school-aged children. But the president’s budget would cut the program by $980 million, or nearly 80%; the House bill would reduce it by $450 million.

Proposed and enacted cuts to the AmeriCorps program, the federal agency that supports national service and volunteerism across the country, are already impacting tutoring. Many affiliated programs have lost staff and are providing aid for students. The president’s budget cuts AmeriCorps by over $1 billion, or 91%, while the House would reduce it by $619 million.

The threats to federal support for tutoring go beyond funding cuts. Earlier this year, the Trump administration , which oversees Title III. During the recent government shutdown, it attempted to eradicate nearly all staff in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which manages Title I, Title II and the majority of federal K-12 funding. And, of course, the recent announcement that the department is transferring the administration of funds to the Department of Labor has only caused more confusion, as has the department’s messaging that staff would be switching departments even as it attempts to fire these same employees.  

The Trump administration and House Republican proposals have failed to leverage the potential of the federal government to help sustain the growth of high-quality tutoring in the nation’s public schools as they work to shrink the size of the federal government. Rather than promoting their frequently stated of helping states lead on education, their budget proposals would sabotage state and local efforts on a widely recognized driver of student achievement, making it harder for states to do right by their students. Congress should push back, protecting programs that fund tutoring and the staff that manage them.

Students who took part in a high-dose math tutoring program developed by in partnership with Oakland Unified School District improved their math scores, according to a recent Northwestern University study.

Children who received at least 10 sessions through MathBOOST saw their scores go up, on average, eight points more on a district assessment compared to those who did not.

MathBOOST, which started in 2023 as an offshoot of an earlier, pandemic-inspired effort around reading, culls tutors from the local community, many of whom do not have prior teaching experience.

Interested parties are trained and most win paying jobs — plus benefits — with the school district. Jessica Fyles, The Oakland REACH’s director of programs, said Northwestern’s findings validate their recruitment tactics.

“You can bring in community members, parents, aunties, cousins, sisters and brothers, to improve results for other people in the district,” she said. “This is untapped talent, people who have not necessarily been in schools before, but have so much knowledge of community. They know exactly what is at stake — and are ready to go all in.”

The Oakland REACH founder and CEO Lakisha Young said the model proves, too, that the people closest to the problem are the best suited to solve it. Unlike school leaders, or even teachers, parents are here to stay, she said.

“So they need to have more tools, agency and power to help close the achievement gap,” said Young, whose tutoring initiative this year expanded to a Fairview, Oregon, public school district and a Denver charter school network.

Meanwhile, Oakland Unified is in the process of taking over the MathBOOST program and is committed to its growth, said Alicia Arenas, the district’s executive director of elementary instruction.

“There is something special and impactful when students see members of their community working at their school sites,” she said.

Go Deeper:

• Tutoring Program in Oakland, Calif. Recruits Parents and Neighbors to Teach Math
  
• A Billionaire’s Gift Expands Reach of ‘Unapologetic’ Oakland Parent’s Group
  
• Oakland Study Finds Parents as Effective as Teachers in Tutoring Young Readers
  

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Evidence-based supports exist that can address these challenges — and more than 400,000 additional adults have helped deliver them in the past three years, . The support includes high-dosage tutoring, which can accelerate learning. Success coaching, which combines academic and social-emotional support and problem solving, improves attendance and achievement. In-school mentoring builds interpersonal relationships that foster school connectedness.

Wraparound support, bringing in community organizations to help with such issues as health and housing, addresses obstacles to well-being. Postsecondary advising gives students clear pathways to adult success and helps them see why full engagement in school matters.    

The challenge schools face in delivering these evidence-based supports more broadly is three-fold. First, they must implement them in ways that align with what the evidence shows drives impact. Second, to be effective, all this must be delivered in the context of supportive, human relationships. This requires “people power,” often beyond what existing school staff can provide.

Finally, it takes significant organizational capacity to provide the full range of support to the large number of students who often need them. Schools therefore need strategies to reduce the number of students requiring additional help, along with systems that get the right supports to the right students at the right time.  

Results from a recent nationally representative survey of school principals provide encouraging news about the spread of evidence-based student support. Yet, the findings also offer a sobering reminder of the work that remains to reach all students who need help.  

— a coalition of 250 nonprofits, 200 school districts, and 80 institutes of higher education working to expand evidence-based student supports for all K-12 students — has partnered with the RAND Corporation to survey the nation’s principals annually over the past three school years.  

Among the most encouraging findings: about half of the nation’s public school principals report that their school provides high-intensity tutoring. This grows to two-thirds of schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. These results are aligned with a administered by the U.S. Department of Education. Mentoring and wraparound support can also be found in about half the nation’s schools.

Nearly all high schools report providing postsecondary guidance. Slightly more than a quarter of schools have success coaches. Over the past three school years, principals report that over 400,000 additional adults have been engaged as tutors, mentors, postsecondary advisors or wraparound support coordinators in their schools.

Clearly, evidence-based student supports have expanded substantially since the pandemic. 

Moreover, half of principals report partnering with a local college or a nonprofit to provide some of these programs. Connections with community organizations that were frayed by the pandemic have been rebuilt and strengthened, bringing more adults into schools to provide critical support for students.

Finally, more principals report the use of student success systems to monitor student progress on key indicators, enabling more proactive and strategic action.  

Despite the positive news, the plurality of principals reports that only some to a few of their students who need help are receiving it. Only 20% to 30% of principals report that most or all students get the support they need. Principals do not see student needs decreasing, four years from the height of the pandemic: Less than 10% reported that fewer students needed support in 2024-25, than in prior years.

When asked what stands in the way of more students receiving support, principals report both supply and demand constraints. Half cited funding as an issue, and a similar share said staffing was a challenge. A third reported that finding enough time in the school schedule was a barrier. Smaller but significant numbers cited lack of student interest, parental reluctance and limited awareness of the support available. 

 A number of schools surveyed have overcome these challenges and scaled evidence-based approaches. About 20% of schools could be described as “full-student support schools,” where principals report providing high-intensity tutoring, mentoring or success coaching, and wraparound support. Around one in five principals report providing high-intensity tutoring or mentoring to more than 30% of their students, at least three times as many as typically received this support pre-pandemic.

This shows that significant numbers of schools, including those who serve high-need student populations, have figured out how to solve the challenges associated with providing a wide range of help to large numbers of students.  

Some schools are trying new approaches, including using Federal Work-Study dollars to support eligible college students working in K-12 schools as tutors and mentors, as well as developing pathways from tutoring or success coaching into teaching careers.

Others are tapping one of the most underutilized and most affordable sources of people power: high school students themselves. Good models exist and in a forthcoming survey from TeenVoice the majority of high school students said they would use peer supports, if offered, and would also be interested in providing them. There are also ongoing efforts to identify how high-intensity tutoring, mentoring and postsecondary advising can be delivered both online and in person. Finally, efforts are underway to broadly expand student success systems.  

For the kids to be alright, we need to provide schools where they want to be, schools where they receive high-quality instruction, and schools where they receive the support they need to attend regularly, focus in class, complete their schoolwork and thrive. We are making progress but still need to scale what has been proven to work. 

Three times a week, the young students struggling the most with reading at each of Milwaukee College Prep’s four campuses go to a dedicated classroom, don their headphones, and log into a virtual tutoring session.

For the next 30 minutes, each student gets one-on-one attention from a certified teacher who might ask them about their dog or their baby sister before diving into the lesson.

Virtual tutoring — in this case through a provider called OpenLiteracy — is the only way Milwaukee College Prep could provide so much tutoring for so many children and from such experienced educators, said Erica Badger, director of curriculum and instruction for the 2,000-student charter network.

“We have a hundred kids on at once,” she said. “Being able to have that many adults come into the school building? I can’t even imagine.”

For these reasons and others, virtual tutoring has remained part of the toolbox of American schools long after students returned to in-person classes. It costs less than in-person tutoring, scheduling is more flexible, and providers aren’t limited to hiring in the surrounding community.

But it doesn’t always work smoothly.

Two studies from Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator released Wednesday used natural language processing technologies to review transcripts from tens of thousands of hours of virtual tutoring sessions. Their goal: to better understand exactly what happens between tutors and students in these sessions.

as revealed through tutor comments, such as “You can’t see me? I’m not sure why you can’t see me” or “Sorry. Did you say something? It was hard to hear.”

Researchers found that 19% of available time was lost to disruptions, whether from technological issues, distracted students, or background noise. Time lost to disruptions was even greater when tutors were working with more than one student, especially if one of the students entered the session late.

The with students in one-on-one sessions and in sessions with two students.

Students were randomly assigned to either an individual tutor or to work with the tutor and another student. Tutors spent more time talking overall when they were working with two students, but only about 21% of tutor speech was individualized content instruction, compared with 65% one-on-one sessions. The tutors in the one-on-one sessions also used more phrases associated with motivation and relationship-building.

Both studies involved young students working on early literacy skills.

High-intensity or high-dosage tutoring, generally defined as occurring at least three times a week and for 10 weeks or longer, emerged as one of the most high-profile and effective interventions to address pandemic-related learning loss. .

The new studies shed light on why virtual tutoring in particular has a mixed track record, according to studies. They also suggest ways schools and tutoring providers can make these sessions more effective. That’s especially important now that federal pandemic relief has expired, and schools have less money to spend.

“There are specific features that effective tutoring programs tend to have, but what is actually driving effectiveness is kind of a black box,” said Carly Robinson, a co-author on both papers and director of research at Stanford’s SCALE Initiative, which runs the National Student Support Accelerator.

The emergence of virtual tutoring provides new opportunities to provide answers, because new technology allows audio and video from these sessions to be analyzed at scale, Robinson said. Previous research using similar techniques found, for example, that tutors tend to , unless that student was a girl paired with a higher-performing boy. In those cases, the boy still got more attention.

Robinson said the research findings shouldn’t deter schools from using virtual tutoring or even from using small group sessions. That 81% of tutoring time was productive even when working with very young children is a “positive finding,” Robinson said.

Students experienced more disruptions when they worked in the corner of a classroom than in dedicated tutoring spaces. Small schools experienced more disruptions than large schools did as they added tutoring sessions. And the youngest children, kindergartners, experienced significantly more disruptions than second graders.

Researchers suggest that schools find a quiet dedicated space for children to work if possible; have an adult on hand to handle tech issues; and be realistic about each school’s capacity to host a lot of video calls at once.

The study on one-to-one versus two-to-one tutoring suggests that tutors may need different techniques, including strategies from in-person small group instruction, to ensure both students get the most possible from each session.

OnYourMark Education, the tutoring provider that was involved in that study, has already overhauled its 2:1 tutoring, CEO and founder Mindy Sjoblom said. Some of these changes were subtle, just as having tutors ask a question and then call on a child, so that both students have to pay attention to the question and think about the answer.

The study took place in OnYourMark’s second year of operation. Now in its fourth year, OnYourMark still offers one-to-one tutoring in , but when districts are paying out of pocket, they’re mostly opting for two-to-one sessions, she said. The company has lost some clients who decided they could no longer afford tutoring.

OnYourMark is piloting a program that has students work independently on an adaptive tech platform three days a week and meet with a tutor twice a week. If it’s successful, it would cost about 60% as much as two-to-one tutoring.

“If schools can’t afford to implement it, we’re spinning our wheels,” Sjoblom said.

Thinking beyond a tutoring ‘gold standard’

A lot of research on tutoring points to a “gold standard,” said Liz Cohen, vice president of policy at 50CAN, an advocacy group, and the author of “The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives.” But schools might also be interested in what a silver standard or a bronze standard looks like.

The two new studies help identify trade-offs in a granular way that can shape training and program design, she said.

“It’s really important research because a big part of making tutoring more effective is figuring out how to scale it and make it more affordable,” she said. “That means figuring out how to make the most out of the tutor’s time.”

But Ashley Jochim, a principal at the Center for Reinventing Public Education, said perfecting tutoring programs won’t have much impact if schools don’t also pay attention to their core instruction.

“What does it mean to do high-impact tutoring in a school system where the classroom instruction has not been optimized?” she said. “This is a huge liability. We optimize too much on these design-based studies without thinking about the system as a whole.”

Milwaukee College Prep originally targeted a small group of fourth graders for extra reading help, but Badger said the network school realized that was too late and not enough. A donor approached the school about wanting to fund something that would really move the needle on student outcomes. A gift of $500,000 a year over three years allows the network to provide one-on-one tutoring for 30 minutes a day, three times a week to 200 first and second grade students.

Sarah Scott Frank, CEO of OpenLiteracy, the tutoring provider at Milwaukee College Prep, said she believes strongly in one-to-one tutoring. When students don’t work at the same pace, it can be “crushing” for the slower student, Frank said.

“One kid would be zooming along, and the kids are very perceptive, and they see that, and they think ‘see, I can’t do that,’ and it reinforces that negative identity,” she said.

One-to-one tutoring costs more up front, she said. But she believes it’s more cost effective because it works.

The charter network already had a classroom aide providing small-group instruction in addition to the lead teacher in every classroom. The charter network has also upgraded its literacy curriculum to add more phonics. Tutors and classroom teachers use the same curriculum and can share data easily.

Teachers practice the transition to the tutoring room and do trial runs with the platform so that students can log in smoothly two minutes before the session is supposed to start. An adult is on hand to troubleshoot tech problems. Attendance is measured in minutes.

“It’s not a quiet environment,” Badger acknowledges. “But it’s this hum and excitement of learning.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ 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.” 

When they first walk into Match Charter Public High School, students confront a purely physical challenge: its steep marble staircase.

Erected in 1917 as part of a three-story auto accessory and, it frames the main hall of Match, one of Boston’s — and the nation’s — longest-surviving charter high schools. With its wide, sweeping opening and challenging rise, it offers an implicit message, students and teachers say: “You must demonstrate a basic level of dedication simply to get to class on time. Come on in. This will be hard, but stick with it.”

“It’s just a thing that happens for everyone who comes into the school,” said senior Caleb Tolento. “You have to get used to the stairs eventually, because you have to go through all the different levels of the school.” 

But alongside the challenge is an unprecedented level of support, students say. 

Founded in 2000 as the uppercase MATCH: Media and Technology Charter High School, after 25 years it remains stubbornly small and intensely personalized, offering a stunning contrast to how many other charter organizations have developed: Each morning, just 266 students from all over Boston — many of whom ride the bus or subway for more than an hour — crowd into the trim three-story edifice.

Once inside, students enjoy a college-prep curriculum and four years of classes in a place that both pushes and nurtures them. 

“You grow up with this community of people that stay with you,” said alumnus Jeffrey Vittini, who graduated in 2023 and now attends Northeastern University. “You get to know everyone.”

In 25 years, Match, which also operates an elementary and middle school elsewhere in the city, has resisted expanding to other neighborhoods, let alone other cities. For the past 22 years, it has occupied the same space that until 2001 housed Ellis the Rim Man. The front corner of the building, facing bustling Commonwealth Avenue, once housed a mobile phone store — it’s now the school’s college counseling office, but everyone still calls it “the cell store.”

Match has kept itself intentionally small, even as a handful of innovations piloted there have spun off.

“We’re not a company,” said Jay Galbraith, the network’s managing director of academics, who offered something approaching Match’s credo: “If we have a good idea that works, share it.”

Since its founding, Match has seen its staffers found , a curriculum company, the coaching nonprofit and , a nonprofit tutoring provider. But it hasn’t expanded its schools portfolio, Galbraith said, “especially if that would come at the cost of not serving our kids as effectively.”

With just three schools, he said, “We can make faster moves,” changing curriculum, services or whatever needs tweaking. “We’re not trying to steer a ship of 100,000 kids.”

This fall, however, political realities are threatening Match’s model, which for a quarter-century has been built partly on intensive tutoring for nearly every student.

What comes after ‘no-excuses’?

Like many charter schools that serve predominantly low-income students of color, Match has spent the years since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests searching for a balance between its no-excuses roots and what many consider a more humane pedagogical and disciplinary approach. 

That, several educators and students said, is a work in progress.

“What we’ve given up is high behavioral expectations that lead to exclusion,” said principal in residence Jermaine Hamilton. So while detention is back on the menu after administrators nixed it during the pandemic, out-of-school suspension isn’t coming back. “We don’t believe excluding our students sends the message that they are welcomed here, that we want them here, and that they are allowed to make mistakes and grow here.”

In the bargain, the school’s disciplinary team has grown from one “dean of school culture” to two.

In interviews, students welcomed the shift, which also meant the end of school uniforms in favor of a moderate dress code. 

Nearly all stressed that close-knit relationships make the school tick.

“They started to realize that the community they’re building up, that’s the biggest aspect of Match that makes it what it is,” said Tolento, 17. “And they’re kind of leaning more into that, especially in the high school.”

In the absence of no-excuses discipline, Match has doubled down on personal relationships and the importance of teachers simply getting to know students. 

“For a time, we replaced ‘no excuses’ with ‘all the excuses,’” said history teacher Andrew Jarboe. While that was challenging for teachers, he said, “Now I feel we’re in a place where we’re sort of correcting and finding the balance.” 

Among the interventions that remain: intensive therapy sessions, extensive academic tutoring and college counseling services that would make a private school headmaster blush.

Nearly half of Match students sit for one-on-one therapy sessions of up to 50 minutes weekly, said Kerry Sonia, one of the school’s four full-time counselors. That reality creates “a culture around counseling where students are super-comfortable with us,” she said. Match students “love talking about their feelings, which is nice.”

A Match alumna herself, Sonia attended both the middle and high school, where she was often the only white student in the building. She recalled that as a student, she often felt that adults, in their attempts to get students to sit up straight, track speakers’ eyes and not dawdle in the restrooms, were quietly offering a kind of implicit character education. But to students it often felt more like behavioral conditioning.

Years later, she sees that approach as dehumanizing. “If someone was trying to track how long it took me to go to the bathroom every day, that would also annoy me.”

The pivot, she said, should be more properly understood as going from “no excuses” to “high expectations and high supports,” emphasizing both more student accountability and self-advocacy.

So even as the school has followed the lead of many high schools in instituting a cell phone ban, seniors may keep phones this fall. It’s a bid to give them a measure of control before they take off for college and careers.

Jarboe, for his part, is delighted. “This is my first year in more than a decade where the cell phone is not ubiquitous,” he said. “My first week of teaching this year was actually quite remarkable. Students were laughing at my jokes again. They were paying attention again.”

He added, “It feels like I’ve got my students back.”

Tutoring takes a hit

One recent morning, tutor Saul Escorza, a recent University of Pennsylvania graduate, sat at a high-top table on the school’s open-concept third floor, as a series of students approached for extra help with geometry. In his first five weeks, he has noticed that many students struggle to keep up with classes that simply move too quickly. 

“If you’re in an environment where they give you a day or two for the concept and then move on, but you need more, you’ll start to fall behind,” he said. “So for me, it’s just trying to figure out where they started falling back.”

Many students are capable of learning math but struggle to recall the basics. “So it’s just making sure that their foundation is solid, and then hopefully from there it becomes much more easy for them to grasp the higher-level things.”

If Match is known for anything, it’s this. It was one of the first charter schools to pilot intensive tutoring for nearly all students. The policy far predated the COVID-19 pandemic — a recent book on the topic called Match “patient zero for tutoring at scale.”

The program began as a partnership with MIT students, who earned federal work-study salaries to tutor Match students a few times a week. By 2003, offered every student two hours of tutoring daily.

But this fall, Escorza is lucky to be here. Federal funding cuts have forced the school to trim its tutoring — each fall, it typically opens its doors with an eye-watering 20-person, full-time tutoring staff. Due to the Trump administration’s nearly $400 million in cuts to the program, Match has had to scale back to just nine part-time tutors.

About 30 Match sophomores — somewhere between 40% and 50% of the class — now get geometry tutoring every day. A few tutors work on life skills for students who need them, while others help students catch up on missed classwork.

Devin Baker, who directs Match Corps, said she’s working on ways to bring it back to its former glory, perhaps by hiring local graduate students. Most years, virtually every freshman and sophomore sits with a personal tutor several times a week. That in particular has long helped Match stand out, since for many students it can mean the difference between taking basic coursework and tackling Advanced Placement courses.

Tutors attend meetings with students’ classroom teachers and special ed staff and are “uniquely positioned to get to know the kids and advocate for the kids on a level that classroom teachers just can’t get to in the same way,” said Baker, herself a tutor as a member of City Year, the AmeriCorps program that until this fall underwrote Match’s tutoring.

Several teachers said the loss of funding carries bigger stakes than just a smaller tutoring corps. It’s “the foundation and the fabric that weave this place together,” said Kyle Winslow Smith, Match’s director of curriculum and instruction for the humanities.

He and colleagues have relied on tutors not just for boosting kids’ math skills but for helping students with executive functioning and planning. It’s also a key pipeline for Match teachers — more than a dozen current teachers started as tutors.

The AmeriCorps funding cuts, Smith said, are devastating to a community like Match. “Because Title I charter schools and AmeriCorps serve communities of color, it is a systematically racist policy that they’re imposing upon these schools,” he said. “And it seems like it’s an intentional move to deconstruct a system that is helping communities of color.”

‘It’s so easy to get help’ 

Asked what they like most about the school, virtually all students say some variation of this: The place is crawling with adults offering assistance.

“The school being so small, it’s so easy to get help,” said senior Brianny Pimentel, 17, who prefers to be called by her nickname: “Zero.”

“If you really need help with homework, or if you really need time to finish a test or a quiz, it’s so easy to look for that help,” she said. “There’s so many teachers and tutors around that can help you.”

Between classes, virtually the entire staff emerges from classrooms to shoo students to their next period. After the last bell, many students stay to socialize, get extra help and chat with teachers, said Devon Burroughs, the school’s vice principal. “They’re just hanging out with each other in the lobby, or they’re sitting with a teacher and just talking about life — not necessarily academics, but just to be around a person. Sometimes we have to [say], ‘O.K., it’s 5:40.’” Even then, he said, students linger in the park near the school, reluctant to go home.

Once they get to junior year, Match students gain access to a five-person college counseling staff that rivals those of elite private schools. Each counselor’s case load typically ranges from just 15 to 20 students, and counselors often help families, tax returns in hand, fill out the federal Free Application for Federal Student Aid. 

Over four years at Match, the typical student receives about 400 hours of college counseling, the school says. Most end up visiting more than 20 colleges.

That support typically pays off: 92% of the class of 2025 attend college, with 83% enrolled in four-year institutions. About 50% of alumni who attend college complete a degree within six years. That’s high compared to other charter organizations such as KIPP, which boasts a . 

Senior Tolento, who first attended Match in sixth grade, has his eyes on “a lot of high-end schools,” including Cornell University. Match, he said, is “advocating for me to keep pushing myself upward.”

This spring, his classmate Pimentel will be the third in her family to graduate from Match. Though admission is by random lottery, students with siblings already attending get a leg up. She’s looking at studying business or early childhood education, possibly at Framingham State University.

“Since Day One, since you’re a freshman, they immediately are like, ‘Put in all your effort,’” she said. “They’re really adamant about you trying the hardest you can to accelerate every year, and this year specifically they’re really putting in the work to help us.”

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 “the accidental experiment” that took place across American schools starting in 2020, as researchers figured out the principles of what was originally called “high-dosage tutoring” but has come to be known as “high-impact tutoring.” 

Its four pillars, according to Stanford’s : 

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’t have been more tailor-made for such a comprehensive intervention. In the course of just a few months, federal aid to K–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, “quickly became the watchword of how learning loss should be addressed.”

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’s publication, Cohen spoke to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s Greg Toppo about her findings and her belief that, despite the bleakness of the past few years, educators “want to do good things for kids, and they’re willing to try new things.”

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 — and to the gold standard that the evidence suggests — 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 — who a significant part, if not all, of their job for some period of time is making sure this program is working — 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 — and the TFA program highlights this — 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 — 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’s Odyssey. It made me think that tutoring could blur the boundaries between who is an effective teacher — and how we find them. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I don’t know about “blur,” 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 — I don’t write in the book at all about AI because the stuff’s being built too rapidly — 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 — we really do — 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 — 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 — 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’s 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 — 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.

At Teach For America, we have spent the past five years learning what it takes to make tutoring work at scale through our Ignite Fellowship. We have reached over 40 communities, partnered with hundreds of schools and trained more than 5,500 virtual tutors. In the past school year, more than 2,000 college fellows or tutors delivered nearly 200,000 hours of customized learning.

The academic results are compelling: Test scores for middle school math students grew at up to 2.5 times the expected rate, and elementary readers grew up to three times faster than average. But the full story goes beyond scores. Tutoring, if designed with care, can advance student learning, support current teachers and inspire and prepare the next generation of educators. Here’s what we’ve learned:

Lesson 1: Training and Support Must Be Non-Negotiable

Too many tutoring initiatives assume goodwill and enthusiasm are enough. They are not. Without structured preparation, tutors risk becoming an inconsistent add-on rather than a transformative force. Ignite builds training into the model itself. Experienced site leaders at each partner school provide curriculum-aligned onboarding and ongoing coaching. This investment matters. Students report not just better understanding of content, but deeper confidence in their ability to learn. Schools see tutoring as part of their instructional strategy, not a Band-aid.

If policymakers want tutoring to stick, they need to fund programs that take support seriously.

Lesson 2: Technology Should Expand Relationships, Not Replace Them

Ed tech is often pitched as a shortcut to efficiency. But high-dosage, virtual tutoring is not a shortcut. It is relational and strategic. Teach For America Ignite uses technology to make those relationships possible at scale, not to substitute for them. Virtual platforms connect fellows to students and teachers across 43 communities, including rural areas where schools struggle to recruit talent.

At Alliance Marine Innovation & Technology in Los Angeles, eighth graders who were three grade levels behind in math saw a 77-point jump in state assessment scores after a year of TFA Ignite tutoring. The technology enabled access, but human relationships drove the breakthrough. As one student put it: “My Ignite fellow could understand me like no other.”

The lesson? It is possible for students and educators, particularly when both are members of generations who grew up surrounded by rapidly changing technology, to use tech as a tool to build important human relationships that accelerate learning. 

Lesson 3: Tutoring Is a Teacher Pipeline Strategy, Whether We Treat It That Way or Not

Perhaps the most underreported story about tutoring is what it means for the future of teaching. A recent provides the first causal evidence that tutoring can spark interest in teaching careers. Using Teach For America’s tutoring and teacher training programs, the research finds that working as tutor for Ignite nearly triples the likelihood of applying to TFA’s teacher program, with the largest effects among men, people of color, and students who didn’t major in education. That is a breakthrough in a sector facing constant shortages and a workforce that doesn’t reflect the students it serves.

TFA Ignite is living proof of this. Since the program launched, 550 fellows have gone on to join Teach For America’s teaching corps. This year alone, 280 new teachers entered classrooms because they were inspired by the impact they had as tutors. For Destiny Edens, a North Carolina A&T undergrad, tutoring became the bridge to a calling she had not considered before. She began tutoring second graders in literacy and discovered a passion that has now led her to join the TFA corps as a middle school science teacher in Philadelphia.

Education leaders talk endlessly about how to attract this generation to teaching as if the pipeline is broken. Tutoring offers one way to strengthen it, by giving future teachers direct experience, mentorship and proof that they belong in the classroom.

If educators keep treating tutoring as an emergency response, we will miss its long-term potential. Tutoring is not just a path to accelerate learning, it is a path to accelerate leadership. It advances growth for students and jump-starts careers for educators. If we’re all serious about helping students thrive and building the next generation of educators then tutoring must be part of the future of schooling.

A new application designed to scale up extra help, was launched in the winter of 2024. Since then, a disembodied voice has been assessing students’ work in fifth- through 12th-grade math and responding as they write out equations, speak or type their questions.

But come early October, the company says, that same gentle drilling will be delivered by the teachers they know best — but only if these often tech-wary educators allow the avatar feature. 

Sawyer Altman, who co-created the app and gave it a quirky name to stand out in a crowded field, bets they will: Goblins embraces — rather than replaces — their role, he said.

“We believe the connection a teacher has with their students is very special and it’s an essential part of that social motivation, the idea that this person sees me, cares about me, is willing to invest in me,” Altman said. “We want to make it possible for teachers to step into this new era of education, which is AI enhanced, on their own terms, where they are still the center of teaching.”

More than a quarter of Goblins’ 16,000 student users — whom Altman said he landed by cold calling their school districts — are located in New York City. 

But his technology can be found in 24 states spanning urban and rural communities, from Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona to Putnam County School District in Florida and a string of Pennsylvania private schools, he said. Students use Goblins for help with Algebra 1 more than any other course.

Michael Molchan, who teaches high school-level math and science to some 40 students at a regional, four-county education center in Pennsylvania, said he’s had good luck with Goblins so far and is open to being “cloned.”  

“If a little avatar of Mr. Molchan opens up and sounds like me, that could be another way of connecting with students and I would certainly be all for that,” he said, adding AI is evolving quickly and that teachers should accept rather than fear it. “If we embrace it and encourage it, but also help the students understand how to use it, they will be better for it.”

Altman, 30 and a 2017 Stanford University graduate who majored in science, technology and society, served briefly as a precalculus teacher at a New York City high school. 

He loved working one-on-one with students to identify gaps in their knowledge — and the relief that came with addressing a problem that could harm their grades and self-confidence, he said. 

With up to 30 kids in a class though, there wasn’t enough of him to go around, he said. That frustration is what prompted him to create the app, which he markets as a math teacher cloning device. 

Altman knows of and hopes his company can overcome the challenges others could not. 

“For so long, ed tech has been hampered by the fact that the tools they created are just not that engaging,” Altman said. “There has been this dream of personalization for at least a decade.”

And now, he said, it’s here. Altman’s AI-powered learning competitors in the math space include the better-known IXL, IReady and the household name that is Duolingo. 

But, he argues, his company’s product, funded in part by the Gates Foundation, is more varied in its communication, conversing with students using speech, handwriting and text. The accompanying avatar will be a step beyond that. 

The cartoonish icons are surprisingly easy to make: Teachers upload a single selfie and then speak into their phone or computer’s microphone for just 30 seconds to create an image in their likeness, he said. 

Goblins works on multiple devices, including touch screen and non-touch screen Chromebooks, iPads and smartphones. Its verbal feedback is accompanied by a written transcript and guides students using Socratic or open-ended questioning, Altman said.

Jenn Tifft is a sixth-grade math and science teacher at Rutland Town School in Vermont and has been using Goblins for about a year. She said her students enjoyed learning to craft their interaction with the app to get the type of support they need. 

“They get to learn how to use AI as a tool to help guide them, as opposed to doing their work for them,” she said. “They liked having it as an option in the classroom.” 

But at least one critic disagrees with Altman’s approach. Benjamin Riley is founder of Cognitive Resonance, a consulting company which seeks to help people understand cognitive science and generative AI. He’s long been skeptical about AI’s role in education — and even more so about this endeavor. 

“Whether the avatar looks and sounds like the actual teacher is irrelevant,” he said. “It is not sentient, and therefore has no capacity to imagine what is happening in the minds of students. This is true of all AI ‘tutoring’ systems. And having it look and sound like the actual human teacher strikes me as a particularly bad idea. What will happen to classroom norms when kids discover they can be rude to the avatar in ways they would never dare with an actual human?”

Altman understands Riley’s concerns, admitting his is a novel technology that “has the potential to rewrite classroom norms.” But he said, too, the context of the classroom keeps kids accountable for their behavior.

Goblins, a private company of just six employees, offers its services in more than 30 languages. And the type of information it generates helps more than the students themselves, Altman said: Classroom teachers have access to a truncated transcript of their students’ interaction with the app and analytics, helping them zero in on any weak points. 

This, Altman said, better informs their interaction with individual students, or, if several children are ensnared in a mathematical quagmire, rearrange the focus of their lessons.

, achievement director for middle school math at KIPP NJ, piloted Goblins last school year before expanding its use to some 550 sixth graders in Newark.

She said the technology helps them with geometry, ratios, fractions and rational numbers, among other topics — and agrees with Altman on the time-saving element.

“Teachers’ response has been fairly positive overall,” she said, adding that it helps children understand more than whether they answered a question correctly.  “It identifies where they might have made a mistake and whether they are far away from the right answer — or close to it.”

The Gates Foundation provides financial support  to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

This story was originally published by . for their newsletters.

More than 250,000 students in Los Angeles Unified will be eligible for extra tutoring, summer school and other academic help after the district settled a class-action lawsuit alleging that its remote learning practices during the pandemic were discriminatory.

The , filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, was announced Wednesday by the law firm representing families who said their children fell disastrously behind during the Covid-related school shutdown in 2020-21.

“After five years of tireless advocacy on behalf of LAUSD students and families, we are proud to have secured a historic settlement that ensures students receive the resources they need to thrive,” said Edward Hillenbrand, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. “This critical support will help pave the way for lasting educational equity.”

Los Angeles Unified had no comment on the case because the settlement has yet to be approved by the court. A hearing is set for December, although the settlement goes into effect immediately.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Los Angeles and nearly every other school district in California closed for in-person learning from March 2020 through fall 2021. Students attended classes virtually, and most fell behind academically. after schools reopened. Chronic .

In fall 2020, a group of families whose children were languishing during remote learning sued Los Angeles Unified, saying the district wasn’t doing enough to ensure students were receiving an adequate education.

One parent, Akela Wroten Jr., said that his second-grade daughter was behind before the pandemic and became even more lost during remote learning. She struggled with reading and never got the extra attention she needed because teachers weren’t assessing her progress.

Another parent, Vicenta Martinez, said her daughter didn’t get any instruction in spring 2020, in part because she never received logon information for remote instruction and the school never followed up. When she finally did access remote classes, the lessons were short and teachers offered little feedback.

“LAUSD’s remote learning plan fails to provide students with even a basic education and is not preparing them to succeed,” the lawsuit alleged.

The suit singled out an agreement between the district and its teachers union that said teachers would only be required to work four hours a day, wouldn’t have to give tests and weren’t required to deliver live lessons — their lessons could be asynchronous, or recorded beforehand. In addition, the agreement said the district wouldn’t evaluate or monitor teachers during that time.

United Teachers Los Angeles supports the settlement, saying it provides more assistance for students while leaving teachers’ “hard-won contractual rights” intact and avoiding “unwarranted judicial interference” in the district.

The union also noted that student test scores have recovered significantly since the pandemic..

The plaintiffs argued that the district’s policies discriminated against low-income, Black, Latino, disabled and English learner students, because those were the students least likely to have adequate support to succeed in remote learning. Those student groups also comprise the vast majority of students in the district, the nation’s second-largest.

The settlement requires the district to offer a host of academic support, including summer school and after-school tutoring, to the 250,000 students who were enrolled in L.A. Unified during the pandemic and are still with the district. Among those students, 100,000 who are performing below grade level will be eligible for 45 hours of one-on-one tutoring every year through 2028.

This article was and was republished under the license.

As a young person living in the San Francisco Bay area in the early 2000s, she stumbled into teaching at Stanford University’s experimental , working with Patrick Suppes, an early innovator in ed tech. His work, reaching back to the 1960s, popularized the notion of computers as “automatic tutors,” a vision now playing out with AI tutors from , and others. 

Trumbore openly admits that she “kind of backed into this business,” working in the entertainment field when she landed a summer job teaching writing at Stanford. 

“I didn’t have preconceived notions of what technology could or should do in education,” she said. “The animating question was, ‘How can we use this tool?’”

Trumbore eventually joined the Stanford-led team that launched and ushered in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the 2010s. 

In her new book , Trumbore calls herself an “ensemble player in the transformation of online education from experimental and low status to ‘innovative’ and ‘disruptive.’ I have also helped make wealthy institutions, venture capitalists, and more than a few professors even wealthier,” she writes.

Trumbore introduces readers to Suppes and to two other key ed tech pioneers of the mid-20th century: MIT’s Seymour Papert and Don Bitzer of the University of Illinois. 

Bitzer created , a groundbreaking, networked course distribution system that could educate up to 1,000 people at once. He and his team developed interactive touch screens and learning management systems, among other innovations. 

Papert, a South Africa-born mathematician who studied with the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, applied the latter’s groundbreaking work to education, popularizing the idea that children should learn about computers by programming them. A co-founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he created , a programming language for children that served as an inspiration for the computer language and countless young people’s .

Despite all the hype surrounding new, AI-enhanced products, most can be traced back to these three pioneers and their teams, Trumbore said. “We make the same discoveries about online education decade after decade because we do not acknowledge — or know — the history of the field,” she writes. “There is evidence that this ignorance is not an accident.”

Trumbore, who worked at the University of Pennsylvania and now creates professional certificate and degree classes at the University of Virginia, recently talked with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s Greg Toppo. She warned that 17 years after the first MOOCs appeared, they’ve failed to bring education to many of the students who most need it: low-income, nontraditional students who could use extra help focusing and mastering difficult material. 

Trumbore sees the same dynamic playing out with generative artificial intelligence, warning that universities must be “more clear-eyed about their business partnerships with technology companies, more thoughtful about their motives in distributing education ‘to the masses,’ and ultimately take inspiration from the past’s successes and failures in order to create more equitable educational experiences that provide more returns to learners than to edtech investors.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I want to actually start with talking about Stanford’s Online High School. So you were an actual teacher? 

Yes.

Live classes, obviously projected over many thousands of miles? 

Yes.

Was the original conception that it was a high school that just happened to have students throughout the world? Was everybody there at the same time for class?

It was synchronous. The idea came in 2004. We got a grant from the to start thinking about this. There’s a series of schools still called the Malone Consortium, and they share content because not every private school can have a Chinese literature course. And this idea of providing access, connecting students to great instructors, was something Malone had been thinking about and servicing for a while. And in its model there were similarities to what the Education Program for Gifted Youth [now Stanford’s program] was doing with its calculus courses.That whole unit evolved to provide access to students who couldn’t take a calculus course because they lived on Martha’s Vineyard or in Alaska, or someplace where they didn’t have access to it. And so this just was an extension, in some ways, to see if we could do it. 

You say the technology wasn’t very good at the time.

It was early, and folks didn’t even have broadband. So that was also a really interesting challenge. Actually before we did the Online High School we started teaching synchronous college classes in the summer, and so that was our beta test case, and I did that for a while. The success of those programs became the basis for the grant application to Malone, which became the basis for, “Let’s do a high school.” And then we formed the full high school, and then we went and got accredited, and it’s thriving today.

That led, in short order, to the phenomena of Coursera and edX. And as you say, you were there as it was taking shape. More than a decade later, what does the MOOC space look like to you? Has it fulfilled its purpose, or has it got the same illness as a lot of ed tech, which is that it sort of lost its way?

I think the answer to both questions is “Yes.” 

If you were an idealistic, super empathetic, early proponent and ed tech evangelist, we were opening up the gates of Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford and Penn and all these wonderful places. It is true that today, which was not true 15 years ago, anybody with an Internet connection can log in and see what’s being taught, or a pretty close version of what’s being taught, at some of these schools. And we forget how amazing that was to have access to that. So in that case, the answer is Yes.

The answer is also “Yes” that it’s lost its way, because the business model behind it is a traditional free-market business model: Scale quickly, make profit, follow users, drive engagement. Don’t worry about making it the best learning experience. Worry about making it the biggest, most appealing learning experience and let the customer decide what it is they’re interested in — let the customer drive the content. 

I guess that’s where I’ve ended up: I believe in the promise of ed tech. I don’t think that the promise of ed tech and the free-market business model are compatible.

I’m taking a Coursera course. It seems perfectly fine to me. It sounds like you would make the case that it could be better if there wasn’t a focus on profit?

There’s a lot that gets lost when we focus on frictionless delivery of content and not on an education experience. Education is difficult. It’s expensive to provide. That’s why we invented Coursera. I think that for educated folks, or for super agentic, bright kids, it’s wonderful. You don’t need much else. I think the problem comes when we say that Coursera is sufficient as an education. And the folks at Coursera would say it’s not sufficient as an education.

Early in the book, you say, “Just beneath the shiny surface of the latest ed tech marvel is the work of Suppes, Papert and Bitzer and many people on their teams who’ve worked, sometimes unknowingly, to extend the past of educational technology into the future.” 

I mean, these were, by our standards, primitive forays. The computers, literally you were having to dial into the mainframe on campus. I guess I want to just make sure I understand the lessons those three have to teach us.

It’s two things at the same time. One is that the goals they had are very similar to what we have today. So one, they’re worthy goals. And two, we haven’t invented the technology to achieve those goals. 

We’ve been talking about individual tutors for almost 70 years, 60 years for sure, quite publicly. So this idea that these are necessary pursuits, that this is going to improve education, I think, is a foundation no one questions. No one questions why we would want a computerized tutor. Believe me, I’ve searched. I did find, I think, three articles that are like, “Hey, hold on here.” Folks are all in on this. 

For Bitzer, what was amazing about him — and he was the true engineer among the group — was using, literally, duct tape sometimes, putting together this system. But the vision of that system and what it enabled, that it enabled communication among students who were learning at the same time — that’s how we now measure success. “How many people do you have on the platform?” That did not exist. That was like, “What are you kidding me? In 1962?” Really revolutionary. 

And with Papert, this idea that we shouldn’t let the computer program the child, but the child should program the computer, I think, is probably the most relevant to the tidal wave or avalanche of ChatGPT in education, that we need to train all these kids to have AI skills. I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but what are we teaching them? Why are we teaching them this? And is this really the right thing to do? And are they using it as a tool, or are they being used as a tool? 

I think these questions are highly relevant, but we forget to ask them, because there is this cycle of funding and social capital for being an innovator and all this stuff that gets really exciting if you’re brand new and chasing the bright, shiny object. Nobody wants to hear about the past. 

I want to drill down on Papert. I think he’s the most interesting of the three in a lot of ways, mostly because he had this fascinating background, studying with Piaget. Explain to me how his thinking about “the child programming the computer” is playing out now with things like ChatGPT. 

It’s different, obviously, school to school. In some schools, students are using ChatGPT as a tool to create things that are useful to them, not to create an assignment: “Hey, you guys need to get together and design a water pump.” Or “Design a Pixar character and build it with our 3D printer.” And it’s a group of kids working together in a team. And they use ChatGPT to come up with some models. They do that, then they send it to the 3D printer. I think that’s a great use of these tools. And there’s someone guiding them. That’s the children using it as a tool. “Kids, today we’re going to do Lesson 4 of OpenAI Academy,” that’s less good. That’s not using it as a tool.

I firmly believe in what Papert was saying, and I think technology is used best when you use it to empower a learner to be more human and to unlock creativity, and that is very possible with these tools. It really isn’t how we deploy them. The way they’re being marketed, sold and consumed, it’s faster to just say, “Watch out: You’re not going to get a job if you can’t master these tools. You’ve got to get ahold of these tools and watch some videos and learn some stuff.” Rather than the more time-consuming, “Hey, try this thing. Try this thing. Use it to make this. Use it to make that.”

It strikes me that the public conversation around ed tech has a weird format. It’s binary, which maybe is appropriate: People want to talk about things like MOOCs and such as either the most amazing thing ever or a total failure. I’m curious if you have a thought on why that is, and how we can emerge from that?

That dialogue, which always cracked me up as well, part of it is innovation, “the violence of forgetting.” I love that phrase, and I end with it in the book. In order for this to have been brand new and amazing, there’s this narrative that’s fueled by cash and investment and people’s eyeballs and all this stuff, that it was a huge success, and then the binary of that, to your point, is that it was a huge failure. Once you add that much money and power into these things, people are not interested in a more nuanced answer, I would argue, to anything. But it’s especially true here. 

Again, I think MOOCs have done a lot of good. It’s amazing that they exist. It’s awesome. But they didn’t cure cancer. They didn’t lift the continent of Africa out of the educational attainment that it currently has. At the time, when people were layering on these hopes for MOOCs, we were like, “This is hilarious.” I mean, we were more stunned and like, “Oh my God, more work.” But in retrospect, it was like, “This is kind of nuts that these folks are flocking to Coursera’s offices, and we’re having lunch with Tom Friedman, and he’s , and you’re so busy making it.” This label gets attached to it, it’s like, “Is this what we’re doing?” And it’s intoxicating to believe that.

I have to apologize, maybe not on behalf of Tom Friedman, but on behalf of journalism. I think we’re part of the problem. I take your point that, on the one hand, it’s amazing that these things exist, but on the other hand, they didn’t cure all these ills. What was the accomplishment? I think there was a lot of hope during the pandemic that this was a world that was going to save us from that catastrophe, and it didn’t turn out to be true, mostly.

So two parts: One, I do think certainly in America we really love to give our power away to technology. We just love it. It’s over and over and over again, starting with the camera. You can look back to anything: the washing machine, cake mix — any of these efficiency-solving technologies that come out, particularly during the course of the 20th century and into the 21st. We tend to take a pretty passive stance toward them and imbue them with all these characteristics that they’re almost God-like. They’re going to save us from ___. And that’s great marketing copy. And those two things are interlinked. But we love doing it, because look at any article about ChatGPT on any given day, and it’s the same idea. So there’s something in our national consciousness that really wants to believe that there’s this amazing technological solution just around the corner that is going to cure everything. Twitter was supposed to democratize democracy. So I think that’s part of the problem. 

But what MOOCs did, and why they’re great, is that if I want to know about something, and I want to know more than just asking ChatGPT or doing a Google search or looking at Wikipedia, I can log on and for free, or for a relatively modest fee, I can learn about this stuff. I mean, just even seeing the modules mapped out, if you’ve never taken Python, and you’re like, “I don’t even know what Python is,” and then you look at Chuck’s [University of Michigan professor Charles Russell Severance’s] , and you see, “Oh, now I kind of know what a computer science course looks like.” 

Right.

That’s amazing. And I think the nearness of it is also really interesting, that people feel like it’s so much more approachable now, and not as exclusive. I think that was some of the good that came out of it; and the fact that companies are offering these to employees so that they can learn how to do things better or use them for their own self-actualization or to make themselves better at work, I think is great. 

And then from some work I did when I was at Penn: People were something like 600% more likely to say “I think I’m going to apply to a higher ed program” after completing one of these courses. People’s conception of themselves changed after they were able to complete a course.

I don’t want to rain on that parade, but I do want to bring up a point you make in the book, which is that a lot of times the people who take advantage of this or benefit from it are people with a lot of agency already.

One hundred percent. They give additional agency to those who have it.

How do we solve that?

I think that providing education in a format that worked for people at the top, say 20% of intellectual distribution and access to higher education — I mean, the first MOOCs were modeled on courses at Princeton, on courses at Stanford — that is not, by definition, accessible education to everyone. Letting everyone into the classroom doesn’t mean they’re going to get it or understand it. And that, I think, underlies that idea, because the inventors, the funders, many of the initial employees, are all part of that group. They all went to the same collection of colleges. They all know people who know people from there. So this is a way of education that works. It’s great to scale that. 

So maybe you catch some people who truly are excluded only because of geography or finances, but they know how to learn that way. That doesn’t begin to address the vast number of people who don’t learn that way, who by the time they’re in the third video, they’re texting or asleep or bored or checked out. It can’t possibly solve the problem. One thing I often say in talks is that if access to education were to solve the world’s education problems, we wouldn’t have all these institutions of higher education, because libraries would have solved everything. Andrew Carnegie .