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02/26/2024. General
Contracting relationships between public school districts and vendors are a common feature of education provision in the United States. Contracted services in schools can range from broad, essential functions such as school meals, bussing, and janitorial services to more specialized services such as the analysis of student data, curriculum mapping, and professional development for staff members. The strength of these contracting relationships depends on vendors providing consistent services and on payment between vendors and districts. Providers are paid with public funds, and communities may expect clear oversight of contracts and transparency about their effects on valued outcomes. Transparency also can help districts make decisions about whether or not to continue contracts with providers.
01/25/2024. General
How often does it happen that a national policy priority, robust research, and the aspirations of classroom teachers converge? On an issue with bipartisan support, no less? Not very often.
But tutoring is an exception. As many as 80 percent of school districts and charter school organizations have launched tutoring programs to help students rebound from the pandemic.
12/05/2023. General
This research report presents the results from the second year of a randomized controlled trial of an early elementary reading tutoring program that has been designed to be affordable at scale. During the 2021-22 school year, over eight hundred kindergarten students in a large Southeastern school district were randomly assigned to receive supplementary tutoring with the Chapter One program. The program continued during the 2022-23 school year, while the children attended first grade. The program embeds part-time tutors into the classroom to provide short bursts of instruction to individual students each week over the course of the school year. The consistent presence of the tutors allows them to build strong relationships with students and meet students’ individual needs at the moment they might most benefit from personalized instruction. The program focuses more time on students with the lowest literacy skills.
11/07/2023. General
This brief provides an overview of available funding for high-impact tutoring programs beyond Covid-19 relief funding (ESSER).
Many streams of funding, on their own or braided together, can pay for high-impact tutoring in U.S. schools.
10/27/2023. General
As schools, districts, and states work to address the student needs following the pandemic, many turned to high-impact tutoring, a research-based approach to providing individualized instruction to students. In fact, thirty-seven percent of public schools reported providing “high-dosage” tutoring on a federal school pulse panel survey in December 2022. In addition, many states have implemented or are exploring policies to increase access to high-impact tutoring. This brief explores the tutoring policy landscape at the state level as of November 2023.
10/16/2023. General
This study is the first randomized controlled trial of a virtual early literacy tutoring program. OnYourMark Education provides tutoring grounded in the science of reading and focused on foundational literacy skills (e.g., phonics, phonological awareness, reading fluency). During the 2022-23 school year, OnYourMark partnered with 12 schools in a large charter-management organization in the southern United States to provide virtual tutoring in school to kindergarten, first, and second grade students. The program included four sessions per week for 20 minutes per session from September through May. We randomly assigned students to one-on-one tutoring (N=510), two-on-one tutoring (N=570), or a business-as-usual control group (N=1,005). We find that students assigned to OnYourMark tutoring scored approximately 0.08 SD higher on end-of-year early literacy tests than students in the business-as-usual control group, with lower-performing students (0.18 SD) and first graders (0.19 SD) assigned to 1:1 tutoring benefiting most. These positive findings from a virtual program with young readers provides initial evidence that virtual tutoring could be a promising option, especially in contexts with barriers to implementing in-person early literacy tutoring.
09/22/2023. General
Districts across the nation use Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) to target appropriate supports for each student. High-impact tutoring is the most effective research-backed academic support – consistently demonstrating from six months to over two years of learning gains for students across grade levels and content areas in a single year of tutoring.
Districts that have chosen to integrate high-impact tutoring with MTSS are finding that embedding this highly effective support into the fabric of their schools improves student outcomes, reduces implementation challenges, improves instructional coherence, and streamlines operations.
07/12/2023. General
Many districts sought to provide students with high-impact tutoring in response to pandemic-induced learning needs. Some started earlier than others, and we aimed to learn from the experiences of the early adopters to help inform a smoother implementation among those beginning the process later. During the 2021-22 school year, we partnered with school districts, tutoring providers, and quarterback organizations that support implementation across districts to learn from their efforts in implementing tutoring.
03/23/2023. General
The content and design of this Resource Library draws on insights from interviews with tutoring program directors, teachers, math directors, STEM directors and other math leaders, as well as from a literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles on math teaching, tutoring, and equitable teaching practices.
The goal of this guide is to provide resources to help tutoring programs provide effective math tutoring for students in need.
03/22/2023. General
This Playbook aims to support HEIs in partnering with school districts to offer high-impact tutoring services. While HEI staff members are the primary audience, state educational officials, school district staff, and school administrators can leverage many of the resources in the Playbook.
02/16/2023. General
The evidence is clear that tutoring can help students learn. Researchers have studied many tutoring programs and, over and over, have found strong benefits for students. In fact, we know of few other options for helping individual students catch up to grade level. Tutoring is the best known approach for acceleration and it can simultaneously improve student well-being and engagement in school. However “tutoring” can bring to mind many different types of educational support, and tutoring programs can vary both in their characteristics and in their effectiveness.
02/03/2023. General
In this brief, we present results from a randomized controlled trial of an early elementary reading tutoring program that has been designed to be affordable at scale. During the 2021-22 school year, over eight hundred kindergarten students in a large Southeastern school district were randomly assigned to receive supplementary tutoring with the Chapter One program. The program embeds part-time tutors into the classroom to provide short bursts of instruction to individual students each week over the course of the school year. The consistent presence of the tutors allows them to build strong relationships with students and meet students’ individual needs at the moment they might most benefit from personalized instruction.
01/11/2023. General
Tutoring Programs
Innovations for Learning’s trained Early Literacy Interventionists use their proprietary TutorMate software to provide data-informed, face-to-face, 1:1 high impact tutoring in phonics, sight word acquisition, fluency, and comprehension.
01/11/2023. General
Voyager Sopris’ Sound Partners is a research-based tutoring program that provides individual instruction in early reading skills. Sound Partners benefits students in grades K-2 who are learning to read and provides intervention for students in grades 2-3.
01/11/2023. General
SIPPS (Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics and Sight Words) is a research-based foundational skills program, developed by Collaborative Classroom, proven to help both new and struggling readers in grades K–12 build skills and confidence for fluent, independent reading.
01/11/2023. General
Reading Rescue is an early literacy intervention used in public schools across New York City. The partner organization supports staff members in using research-based strategies to accelerate reading and writing growth for a school’s most struggling students.
01/11/2023. General
Tutoring Programs
Reading Partners is an evidence-based program that recruits, trains, and supports community volunteers to provide individualized reading instruction to Kindergarten through 4th grade students.
01/11/2023. General
Reading Corps combines the people power of AmeriCorps and the science of how children learn to read. Trained AmeriCorps members are placed in early learning centers and elementary schools statewide to serve as literacy tutors for children from age 3 to grade 3. Tutors work with children one-on-one and in small groups daily, providing literacy interventions that are tailored to each learner’s needs.
01/11/2023. General
OpenLiteracy Reading is anchored in the Science of Reading and its high impact tutoring follows a sequence of lessons that begins with letter sounds, beginning blending, and phonological awareness and moving through advanced phonics. Students who complete levels 9 in the OpenLiteracy Reading sequence successfully will read at an end of second grade level.
01/11/2023. General
Literacy First partners with Title 1 schools in Central Texas to ensure that all children are reading at or above grade level by 3rd grade. Literacy First tutors kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade students through daily, one-on-one, 30 minute sessions designed to strengthen early reading, fluency, and comprehension skills.
01/10/2023. General
Saga Education is an evidence-based, personalized tutoring model designed to support students struggling with math to put them on a path toward success and high school graduation. Saga partners with public school districts to supplement teacher instruction by offering trained tutors for students who are falling behind.
10/03/2022. General
High-Impact tutoring – one-to-one or small group instruction in which a human tutor supports students in an academic subject area – has emerged as the primary strategy for addressing Covid19-induced learning interruptions. As tutoring expands nationally, what can we learn from existing research to inform effective planning and implementation?
07/29/2022. General
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, tutoring has increasingly become a popular tool for learning recovery. By the end of the 2021-22 school year, 23 states (including the District of Columbia) initiated or passed legislation mandating or encouraging tutoring initiatives, and federal pandemic relief funds were made available for school districts to spend directly on tutoring programs. This is all for good reason: over 100 randomized controlled trials show that high-impact tutoring is one of the most effective ways to accelerate student learning.
12/03/2021. General
Substantial new federal funds, such as those from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), are allowing districts to provide students with services such as tutoring that were not financially feasible in the past.
Are these new programs cost-effective enough to merit allocating other funds to sustain them, such as Title I and Title IV funding, after ARPA funding runs out in 2024?
09/08/2021. General
Many education leaders are turning to high-impact tutoring to accelerate student learning and compensate for interrupted instruction due to COVID-19. As federal, state, and local tutoring policies and practices develop, understanding the key barriers and challenges that have the potential to limit program reach and hinder efficacy and then developing targeted approaches to overcoming these barriers can improve the likelihood of success and the ultimate benefits for students.
05/12/2021. General
As we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic and schools reopen their doors to in-person learning, we are faced with the challenge of reengaging students — many of whom have been chronically absent from school and have experienced severe social stresses. With students having faced an extraordinary range of experiences during the past year, a “business as usual” approach is unlikely to rebuild students’ well-being and accelerate their learning. Schools need new approaches, targeted to students’ needs. With funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), schools will have the resources they need to implement these approaches, including high-impact tutoring.