Education Week - October 4, 2023 - 12

the tutoring took place.)
Though it's clear high-dose tutoring costs
more in labor and resources than other forms
of the intervention, Loeb said, there's still no
consensus around how much schools should
pay for the intensive tutoring. Costs depend
on the grades and subjects needed, as well as
access to tutors and space.
But even small in-house programs can help,
particularly for younger students. For example,
Broward County, Fla., provided one-to-one
tutoring for kindergartners struggling with
early literacy. Rather than half-hour sessions,
tutors met with students for seven to 10 minutes
every day, targeting specific skills, at a cost of
about $500 per student per year. " We saw the
proportion of kindergarten students reaching
the goals that the district had set for early
reading go from just under 30 percent to well
over 60 percent. So there was a really dramatic
change, " Loeb said.
Avoiding repeating mistakes
High-dose tutoring has been the centerpiece
of federal learning-recovery efforts since the
pandemic. The U.S. Department of Education
dedicated $20 million in American Recovery
Act money in 2022 to provide 250,000 new
school tutors and mentors via AmeriCorps and
other groups; as of this summer, the initiative
Percent of ESSER Funds Spent by State (2021)
See online version for individual state data.
had provided grants to recruit 26,000 tutors in
high-need areas. The department even urged
universities to extend work-study credit to
college students who serve as school tutors.
But there has been no count of how many new
tutors are working this year.
While the Council of Chief State School
Officers estimates that states have spent $700
million in Elementary and Secondary School
Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funds to expand
tutoring programs, Robin Lake, who has been
closely watching the rollout as the director of
the Center for Reinventing Public Education at
Arizona State University, said districts have been
reluctant to invest in the most intensive tutoring.
" I think, in general, districts have held tight to
the steering wheel. They have put money behind
what they know-more staffing or deferred
maintenance on things, " Lake said. " For many
reasons, the money has not gone as far to things,
like tutoring, that really work. ... It is a huge
missed opportunity.
" That money's already been spent, " she
continued, " but with the remaining funds ...
now, we have a much, much clearer idea about
the scope of the problem, the challenge, and the
needed strategies to address the problem. "
It's not the first time the federal government
has invested in large-scale tutoring expansion,
and education watchers hope districts' current
tutoring efforts prove more effective and
sustainable than the supplemental educational
services that were part of the No Child Left
Behind Act's approach to school improvement
from 2003 through 2015.
Under NCLB, schools that did not meet
annual student-progress goals for multiple years
had to offer low-performing students out-ofschool
tutoring, often provided by the district
or outside providers. Four states today are using
recovery funding to provide similar microgrants
for parents to pay for private tutoring.
But longitudinal studies of those efforts found
that supplemental educational services did little
to actually improve students' reading or math
performance and that schools struggled to align
tutoring with school curriculum or identify the
students who most needed help.
" There's not a lot of evidence that the
supplemental educational services under
NCLB were very effective on average-and in
retrospect, maybe that shouldn't have been
terribly surprising, " said Brian Gill, a senior
fellow at the research firm Mathematica, who
has studied supplemental educational services
and other tutoring programs. " There wasn't
really a systematic mechanism for the tutoring
providers to coordinate with what was going on
in the classroom, which subsequently has been
found-again, not surprisingly-to be one of
the characteristics that tends to make tutoring
more effective. At a minimum, you would hope
to make sure that the tutoring instruction is
reinforcing the classroom instruction rather
than competing with it. "
Experience with NCLB tutoring has
helped clarify factors that make programs
more sustainable, Gill said. For example,
incorporating tutoring sessions into the
school day, rather than before or after school,
eliminates the need for parents to organize
transportation and can give tutors more
opportunity to coordinate with teachers on the
skills students need to practice.
Boosting participation
One simple way to make tutoring programs
more effective and sustainable, Acclerate's
Town said, is to make sure the students who
need tutoring actually participate.
Studies find low-income and low-performing
students-those who are often most in need
of an academic boost-are the least likely
to opt into voluntary tutoring. Rather, she
recommended schools identify and target
specific students for tutoring aligned to the
skills they need to develop.
But Keri Rodrigues, a co-founder and president
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education
12 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 4, 2023 | www.edweek.org
of the National Parents Union, a network of more
than 1,000 parent-advocacy groups nationwide,
warned that schools need to communicate more
clearly with parents about their children's needs to
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