Editor’s note: This was first published in SCHOOLED, Mike Petrilli’s Substack, which hosts weekly education-reform conversations around K–12’s biggest topics.
I’ve been deep in the tutoring space for four years now. Accelerate funds promising programs, research, and policy development in an effort to scale practices that work. We have tried to approach the research with true neutrality, and have not been cheerleaders in the space. After four years, funding more than two dozen randomized control trials and dozens of other studies and analyses, and working deeply in 11 states, here is what I can say with great certainty:
High-dosage tutoring helps students gain a few extra months of learning in core subject areas when the students receive the sessions they are supposed to receive.
What I find heartening in the space is that all of the things that Mike Petrilli recently delineated—from Liz Cohen’s excellent book, The Future of Tutoring—as critical questions are all: 1) resolvable and 2) peripheral to the core question of dosage. Should we ensure tutors are well selected and trained? Yes. Should we align the sessions with core curricula? Yes. But, across a wide range of domains, what we find again and again is that tutoring advances outcomes when it is delivered a sufficient number of times. The other pieces are basically just determinants of the degree of magnitude.
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. Then you wind up with very modest impacts.
That’s a failure of implementation and accountability. I would argue that tutoring doesn’t fall into the category of “it’s too hard so we just can’t scale it.” It’s really not that hard to have tracking systems and accountability for delivery. As with many of the walk-backs in education over the last decade, we just often decide that it’s too hard to do things like say, “if you get money to do this thing, then we require proof that you did the thing.”
I could go on, but to me, high-dosage tutoring is the embodiment of the truly absurd public conversation we have in the ed policy space that goes something like this:
- Here’s a thing that works!
- Hmmm, we have to do some stuff to actually implement it.
- [A bunch of places take the money but just don’t do it.]
- Wow—it doesn’t look like the thing worked.
- Look—shiny thing over there!
I’ve lived through this in much tougher bare-knuckle arenas like teacher evaluation. (Hey, I wonder what two places—in the hundreds and hundreds of data points—had the largest NAEP gains in a cycle ever? Oh, the two places that leaned in on teacher evaluation? I’m sure it’s a coincidence.)
By comparison, tutoring is a layup. People like it (it polls higher among parents than any other education policy). Its evidence base is incredibly strong. Implementation can focus on one simple baseline proposition—ensuring kids get their sessions. And it builds on, rather than replacing, existing instruction.
We make things way too hard sometimes. Let’s get kids to school, ensure they have excellent instructional materials, train teachers on how to use them, have accountability for ensuring students actually advance on track, ensure any student that falls behind grade level immediately begins to receive tutoring, and track and report all of the above. I promise you: It will work.
