Without federal emergency education funds, states likely will play a larger role in supporting high-impact tutoring in schools. State leaders may wonder why and how they can continue supporting student learning through high-impact tutoring — especially as the funding landscape is uncertain.
High-impact tutoring involves trained tutors, supported by ongoing coaching, who supplement classroom instruction by providing small-group, personalized attention. Ideally, tutoring occurs three times a week for 30-50 minutes during the school day throughout the whole school year. Research shows tutoring helps students recover months of unfinished learning.
In New Mexico, students who received high-impact tutoring gained three more months in math learning in a single year than students who didn’t get tutoring. In Saga Education’s case, students gained up to 2.5 years of extra learning after a year of tutoring.
Cultivating Future Educators
To implement high-impact tutoring programs, states and school districts can recruit future educators from their communities to support staffing like Guilford County Public Schools did in North Carolina. This job-embedded runway of in-school tutoring makes sense for states and districts that want to build a future pipeline of teachers urgently. By engaging college students and recent graduates in tutoring roles, districts can offer aspiring educators on-the-job experience and address teacher shortages.
Of the two million higher-education students, 600,000 receive federal work-study dollars. Higher education institutions can use these funds to train and pay students to be tutors so that college students with work-study subsidies can provide schools seeking tutoring with a more affordable labor force. While the proposed federal budget may cut work-study significantly if adopted, it would not take effect until the 2026-27 school year, so states still have time to use those funds to expand tutoring.
Tutoring as an Attendance Support
According to the Brookings Institution, the percentage of chronically absent students has doubled since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and evidence suggests tutoring helps decrease absenteeism.
In the District of Columbia, research showed that tutoring reduced the probability of absences by as much as 11.4% on days when students were scheduled for tutoring. As a result, the District of Columbia’s mayor and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) invested $7 million in local funding to tutor 6,000 students.
OSSE staff also joined education leaders representing 19 states in the inaugural Accelerate State Tutoring Fellowship, which was organized with support from Education Commission of the States. These leaders are developing statewide tutoring policy and implementation frameworks through the fellowship. Networks like this can help states identify new approaches and funding sources to sustain and scale tutoring.
Funding Tutoring Efforts
States and school districts are moving to make tutoring part of their budgets or strategically partnering to sustain it. In Ector County Independent School District in Texas, positive student outcomes led the district to reallocate Title I and state compensatory education funds to tutoring. In Maryland, Gov. Wes Moore partnered with the private philanthropy Arnold Ventures to launch the Partnership for Proven Programs, which provides funds to expand tutoring. In Ohio, the state uses a 3% set-aside of Title I funds to fund tutoring. Federal Title programs remain a stable source of federal funding that states and schools can direct to tutoring.
The research is clear: students who are proficient readers by third grade graduate high school at four times the rate compared to non-proficient students; the same positive effect is true for students who pass algebra by ninth grade. Research on student outcomes shows that early literacy tutoring and middle-late math are areas that can be impactful investments for students. This translates into fewer students dropping out, which preserves valuable per-pupil dollars year after year.
As states look to support student achievement, high-impact tutoring is one of the most effective, evidence-based tools available.
