Tutoring works -- if kids actually get tutored

Large-scale tutoring programs don't produce impressive results, mostly because kids aren't getting tutored, reports Sarah Schwartz in Education Week.

"High-dosage" tutoring (small-group or one-to-one tutoring three or four times a week) can raise achievement significantly, say researchers. Yet "pandemic-era tutoring programs are showing smaller effects on student progress" or no effect at all, in recent evaluations.

Stanford's SCALE Initiative found an urban district's math and reading tutoring produced no achievement gains in 2022-2024. Due to scheduling and coordination problems, students, who were in kindergarten and first grade, received only about a third of the tutoring recommended. Almost half of those who were supposed to be tutored in math received no help at all.

In schools where students received at least half of the recommended math sessions, their achievement grew. The more tutoring they got, the more they progressed.

That wasn't true for reading, which started all students at a very basic level. Even among those who were tutored, only the lowest-achieving students improved.

Large tutoring programs tend to have higher student-tutor ratios and less tutoring time, says researcher Matthew Kraft, who conducted a 2024 meta-analysis. "The quality of delivery and implementation starts to slip when programs are scaling.” Implementation matters, a lot.

Fordham's Mike Petrilli asks: Is doing tutoring well -- so it actually works -- just too hard?

No, writes Kevin Huffman, former education commissioner in Tennessee. We know how to do tutoring effectively, and it's not rocket science. So let's do it. The challenge that we keep seeing — which Jill Barshay covered in Hechinger, analyzing the University of Chicago’s large scale study — is that districts and schools repeatedly fail to deliver the sessions." It's not that hard to require proof that kids are being tutored before cutting the next check.

Tutoring should be aligned with what the classroom teacher is teaching, says 50CAN's Liz Cohen, author of a new book, The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives. It must be delivered consistently, ideally with the same tutor working with no more than four students.

The good news is that tutors don't have to be teachers or even aides. College students, perhaps those considering a career in teaching, can be effective teachers, schools have found. So can stay-at-home mothers and older adults.

Yes, implementation is hard, Cohen says. But some schools are building tutoring into the school day in K-3 and seeing strong results.