The news about the reading and math skills of K-12 students nationwide is dire: Academic recovery after the pandemic has stalled in the case of mathematics, and reading scores have hit a new low, as reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Students in high-income districts have progressed much faster than those who come from low-income ones, widening gaps among groups of students.
Between the doom-and-gloom, though, there were a few signs of growth to celebrate, like in Louisiana, Atlanta, and Ector County, Texas. While bright spots may be few and far between swathes of students who are struggling to perform at grade level, they reveal a key connection between academic achievement and the resources spent on tutoring students either in school, after school, or during the summer.
There might be hard-nosed evidence in favor of high-impact and high-dosage tutoring, which is generally defined as regular one-on-one tutoring or tutoring in very small groups, but two specific things threaten its continuation in schools, experts said. One, pandemic-era aid has stopped; and two, public schools are staring in the face of budget cuts due to enrollment changes and shifting federal priorities.
These changes could put the future of high-dosage tutoring, along with other academic interventions, in jeopardy.
States will soon have to prioritize how they want to spend their resources, said Kunjan Narechania, chief executive officer at Watershed Advisors, an education consultancy firm that partners with states to generate and implement education reforms. She spoke on panel convened here on Feb. 12 by Accelerate, a national nonprofit that promotes evidence-based tutoring interventions.
“I hope that states are really scrutinizing where their dollars are going and making choices to redirect dollars to strategies that are evidence based,” she said. “If you ask me if that’s going to happen wholesale, I think we’re going to see significant variation [between states], just as we did with [pandemic-era] spending.”
Successful tutoring needs a supportive ecosystem
Narechania said on the panel that for tutoring efforts to succeed, they must be part of a larger vision that a district or state has around student success. An “anchoring” vision could then help decide what kind of training teachers need, what kind of data and feedback systems need to be put in place, and what instruction will look like.
States have to decide “what they want their children to experience differently,” Narechania added.
Louisiana, which ranked second among states in math recovery and first in reading in the recent NAEP results, followed such an approach. Louisiana’s 4th graders are scoring higher in reading now than they were before the start of the pandemic—the only state that’s made statistically significant progress in that area since 2019.
The work of aligning tutoring to students’ academic needs dates back to the 2020-21 school year, when Louisiana implemented a K-3 literacy screener, said Kelly Bottger, the executive director of Louisiana Kids Matter, an advocacy group that works with the state government on education policy.
Bottger said on the panel that the literacy screener became a way to introduce high-dosage tutoring for students who were reading below grade level—a substantial 75 percent.
Over three years, that number has come down to 25 percent. “We’ve come a very long way in a short among of time with kids who were negatively impacted, because they were in 1st grade at the time of the pandemic,” Bottger said.
To ensure that pandemic-relief aid went toward supporting literacy interventions, Bottger said the state’s education department created a dashboard that tracked what districts were spending their funds on, and how much went to efforts like tutoring.
Added Bottger: “It was public accountability, … the districts didn’t want to look they were [only] putting in football fields. They started spending money on high-dosage tutoring interventions and literacy training.”
Louisiana received $4 billion in federal pandemic relief for K-12 schools—or roughly $5,700 per student—which is more than the national average of $3,700 per student, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard.
The screener, the accountability measures, and the in-school tutoring were all part of a larger “package” that aimed to bring reading scores up. Additionally, the Pelican State also gave parents $1,000 dollars to spend on digital tutoring options, if their children needed additional support in math and reading. That amount was increased to $1,500 in 2024.
Now, 20,000 people have enrolled in that program and double that number are on the waitlist, said Bottger.
Louisiana is now keen to introduce a K-3 math screener, alongside the one for literacy. “The thinking is that if it [the interventions] worked for literacy, it should work for math,” said Bottger.
Tutoring is now more in the hands of states than ever, said Narechania. States like Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia have included tutoring as part of their larger vision to benefit students.
For example, Narechania said Virginia has purchased different tutoring options which are offered as part of the Multi-Tiered System of Supports in schools, or other types of interventions.
“When tutoring becomes part of the system, then you can see things sustain,” she said. “But it’s not the norm yet.”
