This Is a Critical Moment for High-Impact Tutoring. Don’t Give up on It

The 74

Kerr & Bendheim: Despite financial and scaling challenges, keep programs going by getting creative with funding, focusing on evidence-based practices.

High-impact tutoring has the strongest evidence base of any approach for improving student learning, and contributes to increased engagement and attendance. As far as proven education solutions go, it’s a pretty darn good one, and has rightfully been a bipartisan priority since the pandemic. 

But federal pandemic relief money that helped fuel the expansion of such programs dried up in September, and recent research has sparked debates about the high-impact tutoring’s effectiveness when implemented at scale. This includes an evaluation of Metro Nashville Public Schools’ tutoring program that reported small gains for students and a meta-analysis of large high-impact tutoring programs that showed challenges in maintaining evidence-based practices

Still, our experience in implementing and evaluating high-impact tutoring programs shows that if states and school districts get creative with funding and focus on implementing key evidence-based practices, they can achieve the positive outcomes for students that research shows are possible.

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