Adapt this document to advocate for your HEI’s support of a high-impact tutoring partnership with a local K-12 district.
What is High-Impact Tutoring and how do higher education institutions partner with school districts?
High-Impact Tutoring is tutoring that has directly demonstrated significant gains in student learning through state-of-the-art research studies or tutoring that has characteristics proven to accelerate student learning. High-Impact Tutoring responds to students' individual needs and complements their classroom curriculum.
Higher education institutions across the country have developed and are developing partnerships with school districts to accomplish two primary goals:
- Support K-12 students with accelerating their learning through targeted, individualized instruction.
- Provide students in higher education institutions with mission-oriented, meaningful career development opportunities in the local community.
Examples of successful programs include:
Why should our institution invest in this work?
Partnering with a K-12 district or school to provide high-impact tutoring is a mutually beneficial endeavor. Benefits to HEI students and institutions include employment and career exploration opportunities for students, research opportunities and tangible and impactful community investment for the HEI, and direct instructional experience for teacher preparation program students. Benefits to K-12 students and institutions include opportunities for students to receive instruction with strong instructional pedagogy to support student learning, to build a greater connection to their local college campus, and to develop positive “near-peer” relationships for older K-12 students.
How can the university financially support this work?
While there are multiple funding sources available to support payment of tutors, there are necessary costs associated with developing and sustaining a tutoring partnership that are ideal for the university to fund directly, particularly in the first 3-5 years of implementation. Those costs are both through direct funding for one or more full time staff members, depending on the design and scale of the program, to run the day to day logistics of the program, and for in-kind support from the university. Examples of in-kind support include shared university services (i.e., legal services, marketing, HR) and space for the program to operate (i.e., office space and rooms for tutor training).
What are the major costs we need to consider?
This HEI Funding/Cost Tool for Planning a District Tutoring Initiative includes a list of costs and funding sources based on interviews and feedback from existing HEI tutoring partner programs. The most major cost that the university should consider funding to ensure the program is successful is one or multiple full-time staff to plan and sustain the initiative with the district, at least for the first five years of programming.
If I am interested in providing greater financial support, what should I do next?
- Meet with the program staff that have been running the program or that have spearheaded the initiative at your institution to learn more about their needs.
- Leverage the HEI Toolkit for Tutoring Partnerships to support your program design and implementation.
- Aligned with the President’s Call to Action and the work of NPSS, increase the Work-Study allocation for community-based jobs to 15%.