Planning

Decades of research have shown that high-impact tutoring is the most effective support to transform outcomes for struggling students. High-impact tutoring offers students access to a trained adult who has content knowledge, pedagogical training, and provides one-on-one or small group sessions. Over time, the tutor develops a relationship with the student, builds their confidence, and adapts the learning dynamic to the student’s needs in real-time. The best tutoring pairs consistent intervention with point-in-time assessments that monitor progress and inform instruction to catalyze growth.

School and district leaders are often under the impression that there are limited financial resources to bring such individualized support to students. Fortunately, there is an array of funding resources at the district and school level to create and sustain high-impact tutoring programs for the students who need the support the most.

As many as 80 percent of school districts and charter school organizations have launched tutoring programs to help students rebound from the pandemic. The challenge now is to scale evidence-based tutoring that gets results and sustain it beyond the fast-approaching deadline to spend federal pandemic-relief funds.

To learn more about how districts are doing this, FutureEd Policy Director Liz Cohen will moderate a discussion featuring:

• Zenovia Crier, principal of Lyndon B. Johnson Elementary School in Odessa, Texas
• Michael Duffy, president of the Great Oaks Foundation
• Katie Hooten, executive director of Teach for America’s Ignite tutoring program
• Susanna Loeb, executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University

This Playbook aims to support HEIs in partnering with school districts to offer high-impact tutoring services. While HEI staff members are the primary audience, state educational officials, school district staff, and school administrators can leverage many of the resources in the Playbook. 

Program Design

Adapt this document to advocate for your HEI’s support of a high-impact tutoring partnership with a local K-12 district.

What is High-Impact Tutoring and how do higher education institutions partner with school districts?

The purpose of this guidance is to provide HEIs with ideas for how to recruit university students to serve as tutors. These ideas are curated from current practices shared by HEI tutoring programs in local K-12 districts. Depending on the population of students you intend to recruit, some of these ideas may be more relevant to your context than others. 

Recommended Division of Functions Across HEI Departments

Aligned to TQIS Quality Standards 

The purpose of this guidance is to provide HEI partners with ideas for how to engage K-12 students more broadly with the HEI community.  This list is curated from practices shared by current HEI tutoring programs in local K-12 districts.  Depending on the design of your program and your HEI campus, some of these ideas may be more relevant to your context than others. 

Once the partnership between the HEI and K-12 schools is established, regular meetings between the HEI and K-12 schools ensure that the partnership remains healthy and improves over time.

The purpose of this guidance is to provide HEIs seeking opportunities to partner with a school district with information about how to identify districts interested in and/or already offering tutoring services.

Use these ten multiple-choice questions to design your tutoring program’s Model Dimensions. Model Dimensions are the specific design choices a new tutoring program makes at the outset. Each choice you make should have a clear rationale supported by your Landscape Analysis and be made in consultation with your school district partner and internal task force/team. 

This document outlines costs and funding sources needed to develop and/or grow a tutoring partnership between your HEI and a local K-12 school district. The amount and type of funding needed will be based on the model of your tutoring program. Use this cost calculator and HEI-specific budgeting template to understand your projected costs.

Rebuilding students’ self-esteem requires ongoing support from the same tutor, said Susanna Loeb, an education researcher at Stanford University. Those relationships, she said, allow students to take risks and work until they understand the material.

In the year since Cardona’s address, she said she’s seen real improvement in some district’s ability “to actually pull off harder, more intensive support for students.”

That’s partly due to her previous work at Brown University on the National Student Support Accelerator. The center summarizes important research about high-dosage tutoring — likely the inspiration, Loeb said, for Cardona’s prescription for “30 minutes per day, three days a week, with a well-trained tutor.”

Tutoring is one of the most popular strategies for helping students catch up in the wake of the pandemic. But cost, staffing, and scheduling challenges often make it hard for schools to get these programs off the ground.

A sweeping $10 million research effort announced Thursday aims to tackle that problem by studying 31 different tutoring initiatives across the country this school year. The goal is to answer some of the biggest open questions about how schools can put successful tutoring programs in place for more students — and then figure out if they worked.