It’s Time for a National Tutoring Corps - Rob Horowitz

It’s Time for a National Tutoring Corps - Rob Horowitz

Our elementary and secondary school students are still struggling to recover from the high level of learning loss, resulting from the frequent school closures and widespread use of relatively ineffective remote learning techniques during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The pandemic left students, on average, five months behind in math and four months behind in reading by the end of the 2021-22 school year, with even more significant losses for students in majority-Black or low-income schools,” reported the Center for American Progress. 

 

Even before these significant learning setbacks, too many of our children and teenagers were lagging behind.  Students in other comparably economically advanced nations outperformed American students, particularly in math and science. In the aftermath of the pandemic, these gaps--if anything--are widening further.

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This is a problem that must be attacked on all fronts. There is one solution, however, that stands out and could make a major nationwide difference if implemented at scale. An impressive body of research shows that high-dosage tutoring demonstrably reverses learning loss. It also works more broadly, helping students who are performing below grade level catch up.

 

High-dosage tutoring initiatives provide the kind of intense, focused, and consistent tutoring that is often absent from the after-school tutoring programs offered at many public schools. These well-designed and structured sessions are conducted during school hours by professionally trained tutors who meet with the same students in small groups of no more than four at least three times each week for sessions that last at least 30 minutes.  The tutors receive “ongoing support and coaching,” according to the Center for American Progress. 

 

This high-impact tutoring is “20 times more effective than standard tutoring models for math and 15 times more effective for reading,” according to randomized experiments conducted by Roland G. Fryer Jr, cited by the Center for American Progress.  A recent meta-analysis found that these kinds of tutoring interventions “increased achievement by roughly an additional 3 to 15 months of learning across grade levels, according to EdResearch for Action. High-dosage tutoring is “one of the few school-based interventions with demonstrated large positive effects on both math and reading achievement,” documented EdResearch.

 

Despite its demonstrated effectiveness, less than 4-in-10 American K-12 schools provide high-dosage tutoring, according to a School Pulse Panel survey. Only 11% of public school students nationwide participate in high-dosage tutoring.

 

Lack of sufficient funding, a shortage of tutors, and basic implementation issues are among the barriers standing in the way of more widespread adoption around the nation of high-dosage tutoring.  To be certain, there has been some progress.  The National Partnership for Student Success(NPSS), a joint effort of the White House, AmeriCorps, and the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center, has recruited and trained 80,000 or so adult tutors in its first year of operation.  There will soon be available free online training for people interested in becoming tutors, drawing on the expertise of Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator, among other subject matter experts, and funded by the Annenberg Foundation.

 

These substantial efforts, however, fall well short of what is needed to provide trained tutors to all the students who could benefit from them. That is why many educational leaders, including Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham University, are calling for the establishment of a National Tutoring Corps.

 

A sufficiently funded National Tutoring Corps would provide the central focus for advertising, outreach and training required to produce the hundreds of thousands of new tutors that are needed to ensure that all students who could benefit from this highly focused and effective method have the opportunity to be assisted.  This tutoring corps can also leverage work-study funds to better and more cost-effectively recruit and place college students, a prime and mainly untapped source of new tutors.  As a recent Brookings Institution policy brief persuasively argues, college students make excellent tutors as long as they are properly trained, and a substantial subset of them need the extra income they could earn.  Additionally, the National Tutoring Corps can serve as a central location for the technical assistance and administrative guidance that prepares school districts to better implement this initiative.

 

A National Tutoring Corps can supply all the students who need it with an opportunity within the school day to substantially better their chances of success in school.  In a competitive global economy, where knowledge, skills and the ability to learn and adapt are essential, ensuring our students graduate high school with a solid foundation upon which to build is a key to individual success in the workplace, as well as to keeping our place as the world’s strongest economy.

 

In short, a National Tutoring Corps is an idea whose time has come.