Tutoring is by far the most effective way to help children catch up in school, according to extensive research. The research community has called on schools to spend much of their roughly $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds on so-called “high-dose” tutoring. This means that students have lessons at least three times a week, working one-on-one with tutors or in very small groups with tutors, using clear lesson plans, rather than just helping with homework.
Many schools have adopted this view frequent tutoring. So far, we have some preliminary data that, at first glance, might give the impression that tutoring is working quite well.
- In Tennessee, 50,000, or about 5 percent of the state’s elementary and middle school students, received intensive instruction during the 2021-2022 school year. In June, the state reported tremendous academic gains for students statewide, which was new five-year reading achievement records. In math, students are on track to recover all of their learning losses from the pandemic within three years.
- Amplify, a curriculum development and assessment company that entered the tutoring business during the pandemic, said about 60 percent of students who received online tutoring at least twice a week in 2021-2022 made significant gains in reading compared to with only about 40 percent of students not receiving tutoring but also significantly behind grade level at the beginning of the year.
- Saga Education, a nonprofit tutoring company that focuses on ninth-grade algebra in low-income schools, reported that 78 percent of the more than 6,000 students it tutored in six cities passed their math classes in the spring of 2022.
This is all good news, but none of these data points is proof that tutoring works.
In Tennessee, students who were targeted for tutoring — those who were significantly behind grade level — did not do as well as students in general. Indeed, the number of low-income children who fell “below basic” — the lowest category on the annual state tests — continued to rise last year. In 2019, before the pandemic, 31 percent of Tennessee’s low-income students were reading at “below basic” levels. That number has risen to 33 percent in 2021 reached 36 percent in 2022.
That suggests Tennessee’s strong gains last year were driven more by other educational changes that helped high- and middle-class students who weren’t getting tutoring. Last year, for example, Tennessee revised the method of teaching reading to all students.
It’s possible that the 50,000 struggling students who received tutoring last year would have fared much worse without the extra instruction. Or maybe it will take some time for schools to create new tutoring programs and it’s not showing great results yet. Brown University’s Matthew Craft is studying tutoring in Nashville to help answer these questions, but methodological research has been slow.
“We have to be prepared for the staggering results of tutoring,” said Craft, who believes it will take time for schools to figure this out. “Changing education systems on a large scale is difficult.”
Meanwhile, tutoring companies report impressive but unproven success rates for students who attend frequent tutoring sessions. It may be unclear whether students who show up day after day are more motivated and would do just as well without tutoring. While we await more rigorous results comparing enrolled and non-enrolled students one by one, one problem is already emerging: low participation or attendance.
In one major city, Amplify contracted to teach nearly 1,200 students three times a week with a tutor who delivered classes via video call, similar to Zoom. Over 100 kids have never logged in to contact a tutor online. Only 200 students – less than 20 percent – received at least two classes per week for the entire academic term. More than 80 percent received less, often much less.
I spoke with a school administrator at another school district south of Fort Worth, Texas, which assigned 375 third-graders in all 15 of its elementary schools to use Amplify tutors for the spring semester. The Crowley school district especially wanted the lowest-performing third-graders to receive tutoring because their first- and second-grade years were severely disrupted by the pandemic when they were just learning to read.
Tutoring sessions were to be held during the school day, during a special half-hour session dedicated to extra catch-up, but teachers had the discretion to bring out computers to connect students to remote tutors. Overall, students attended only 46 percent of the sessions that were scheduled to take place.
“Attendance has been an issue,” said Crowley’s chief academic officer, Nicholas Keith. “Some campuses have bought into it. But some found it difficult to find time for the tutoring component.’
Teachers may have been hesitant to put their students in front of screens, Keith explained, and wanted to work directly with students themselves. At the same time, the district saw high teacher absenteeism as viruses broke out in their community, and substitute teachers often didn’t know they were supposed to set up computers for tutoring.
Next year, Keith said he plans to continue with online tutoring only in schools that use it well. In some schools, more than 60 percent of students attended classes regularly, and teachers saw progress in students’ reading skills, Keith said.
Meanwhile, Saga, which taught more than 6,000 ninth-graders in math during 2021-2022, reported that students attended an average of two-thirds of their face-to-face daily classes, with attendance rates ranging from 87 percent in Washington to D.C., to a low in 49 percent in Providence, Rhode Island. Among the 62 percent of students who received at least 80 hours of tutoring, 87 percent took math classes last spring.
Saga tutoring is a scheduled course during the school day called “math lab” with no other competing academic sessions at the same time. “The attendance rate is the same as a student’s attendance rate,” said AJ Gutierrez, co-founder of Saga.
An outside research firm, Mathematica, is now studying the results of Saga tutoring during the pandemic, analyzing the trade-off between large groups of tutors and how much students gain from tutoring. Larger groups are more economical and cover more students.
The Tennessee Department of Education said attendance at tutoring sessions scheduled before and after school has been significantly lower. However, most schools chose to provide tutoring during the regular school day, according to the department. “Tutors often pull students out of classrooms to ensure that students who are in school receive a tutoring session,” a department spokesperson explained via email.
Saga’s Gutierrez says he’s heard stories of after-school and summer programs that haven’t been able to lure students into tutoring classes with gift cards, movie passes and meals. “I know of a principal in North Carolina who went above and beyond (i.e. added extra classes) to get 100 students at his school to attend summer classes, but ended up with only 21,” Gutierrez said via email.
Tutoring was an important component of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which aimed to improve the academic performance of low-income children. But between poorly trained educators and open scandals with theftsit was not success. This time, many schools are trying to improve the quality of tutoring. But attendance is uneven.
One suggestion to help tutoring fulfill its promise came from Bart Epstein, president of the EdTech Evidence Exchange, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping schools make better decisions when purchasing educational technology. He is also the former head of the tutoring company tutor.com. “No school district should pay for tutoring if the kids don’t show up,” Epstein said. “This is ridiculous and wrong for many reasons. Anyone who enters into a contract that results in a tutoring organization paying for the services of 1,100 students when only 200 are receiving services should be ashamed of themselves.”
“If you want tutoring companies to get kids to show up,” Epstein said, “draft your contracts so they have an incentive to do that, even if it requires the tutoring companies to hire medical professionals, social media people, people, that serve customers. to call the parents and meet with the children to find out what they need.’
This story is about tutoring was written by Jill Barsha and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit independent news organization focusing on inequality and innovation in education. Subscribe to Hechinger Newsletter.
