Huffman and Jefferson: Tutoring isn’t just an investment in students – it’s an investment in our country’s future.

By Kevin Huffman & Sadie Jefferson

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

The pandemic accelerated tutoring like never before – expanding the ways we deliver it and propelling it to the top of the list of effective interventions for closing academic gaps.

Armed with $190 billion in COVID-19 recovery funds from the federal government, nearly every state spent at least some of it on tutoring, with more than half adopting standards to ensure districts and schools used high-dosage, high-quality programs. During the 2022-23 school year alone, states spent $1 billion of federal pandemic aid on tutoring, on top of an estimated $3 billion in COVID funds spent by districts on such efforts. 

Five years after the pandemic dramatically disrupted learning, with the federal aid now spent, America’s education system is still struggling to regain lost ground. The latest NAEP scores reveal persistent academic gaps, underscoring the urgent need for effective interventions.

Amid all the setbacks, tutoring has broken through as one of the few recovery strategies that states and districts are strategically embedding into their budgets—expanding, refining, and solidifying programs that, in some cases, have delivered significant gains in student achievement. 

Even in these politically divisive times, there’s one thing we can all agree on: Every student deserves the opportunity to build foundational skills in reading, writing, and math that will serve them through life. With nearly $1 trillion spent on education each year, we must ensure that investment translates into real educational opportunities that lead to good jobs and meaningful lives. 

High-dosage tutoring delivered during the school day from a consistent, well-trained tutor is the most promising lever for change. In Rapid City, South Dakota, a group of retired teachers come to Title I schools each day to work as tutors, one-on-one with predominantly indigenous students. In Harrison, Colorado, paraprofessionals tutor students — and become so inspired by the academic success that they become full-time teachers themselves through innovative educator apprenticeship models. In Springfield, Ohio, aspiring teachers tutor local elementary school students building their skills while shoring up those of their students.

Over the past two decades, our organizations have dedicated significant resources to studying, supporting, and scaling this approach. Not only are we optimistic about what we are seeing, but we are firmly convinced that school systems, policymakers, and philanthropic leaders must double down on their commitment and investment to this transformative work.

This belief is driven by significant progress and success across several key areas: continued positive research on tutoring outcomes; growing demand from parents and teachers and schools; viable paths to affordable delivery at scale; new models that solve implementation challenges of time, people, and money; better understanding of policies and data systems that improve tutoring delivery; and a nascent AI sector with the potential for significant breakthroughs.  

High-dosage tutoring is uniquely effective in helping students learn, including when implemented at scale. A recent analysis by University of Virginia researcher Beth Schueler, along with Brown University’s Matthew A. Kraft and Grace T. Falken, analyzed 282 randomized control trials and found that large-scale tutoring programs yield months of additional student learning per year, though effectiveness diminished as programs scale beyond 1,000 students. Yet even large-scale tutoring results were stronger than educational interventions like summer school, class size reduction, and extended school days. Additionally, recent studies of individual tutoring programs continue to find strong positive effects on students, even in challenging learning conditions. 

Importantly, schools and parents want more tutoring in their schools. The most recent NCES nationwide survey of school leaders found that high-dosage tutoring implementation increased again last year, growing from 39% of schools in 2022-23 to 46% of schools in 2023-24. This is not just a fleeting post-pandemic trend — schools are investing in tutoring even as federal relief funding winds down, because tutoring is wildly popular with parents. In Louisiana, high-dosage tutoring outperformed every other education policy polled, with an astonishing 90% approval. 

Despite our prevailing partisan politics, the push for more tutoring comes from red and blue states, from city systems and rural counties – with some wondering aloud whether tutoring is the next big bipartisan school reform. 

Arkansas passed regulations outlining the characteristics of quality tutoring and requiring student-level reporting of delivery so that the state can manage implementation, elevate best practices, and support struggling schools. Baltimore City Public Schools is currently tutoring over 10,000 students through partnerships with external tutoring providers and a district-run program using paraprofessionals. 

Pitt County, North Carolina partnered with Tutored by Teachers to provide critical tutors to multilingual learners, using technology to deliver services in students’ native languages, including even American Sign Language, in rural schools. And New Mexico is expanding virtual middle school math tutoring statewide, breaking down barriers to access for students in rural areas. 

Federal pandemic aid may be gone, but state appropriators are putting money where they’re seeing progress: Virginia added $418 million in its state budget for academic recovery, with plans to spend 70% on high-dosage tutoring for its students who are furthest behind academically. Maryland stood up a $28 million middle school math tutoring program for underserved students. And Michigan set aside $150 million in state funds last year for intensive tutoring.

Finally, we are at the very beginning of a wave of innovation fueled by emerging technologies like AI. Innovation through virtual and hybrid models has helped reduce both the cost of tutoring as well as implementation barriers. The months of learning from past studies will soon come from programs that are cheaper and easier for schools to implement without losing the ability to personalize tutoring sessions, support tutoring quality, and maintain program effectiveness in student learning. 

Collectively, our organizations, and other like-minded organizations such as the National Student Support Accelerator and Saga Education, have supported tutoring delivery to hundreds of thousands of students, have launched and published dozens of studies on tutoring, and have infused tens of millions of dollars into the space to spur innovation and capture learning. But we still have more work to do. 

Five years after the pandemic began, students remain behind where they should be, and the gaps between Black and Latino students and their peers are growing rather than shrinking. Federal relief funding that allowed districts to try new things has run out. And yet the evidence has never been clearer: High-dosage tutoring works and can help millions of students. But without action, this critical intervention risks being lost to politics, budget cuts and inertia. There is enormous potential in staying the course with continued investment in high-dosage tutoring. 

We must double down on evidence-based strategies, reject fatalism, and embrace the urgency of this moment. The latest NAEP scores confirm what’s at stake. States, districts, and funders must step up to ensure that every student who needs tutoring gets it. This isn’t just an investment in students – it’s an investment in our country’s future.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and The 74.