American parents care deeply about their local schools and are committed to improving education. That’s because Americans know that education plays a crucial role in shaping our children’s future. So the ultimate question is not “should we improve public schools” but “how”?
While the news headlines about the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress felt grim, bright spots bucked the national trends in exciting and promising ways and beg for our attention. These bright spots point us in the right direction, if we’re willing to learn from them.
NAEP shows that, nationally, student achievement in both math and reading remains below pre-pandemic levels and that the gulf between high- and low-performing students is widening. But it also shows successes. Students in Louisiana have made unexpected gains—performing better than they had in 2019, and the state’s ranking in 8th grade reading has shot up from 42nd to 16th.
Similarly, 4th and 8th grade students in the District of Columbia performed on average at or above “proficient” levels in both math and reading, and a higher proportion of students moved from “below basic” to “basic” and from basic into proficient and “advanced.”
NAEP describes achievement gains and losses; it doesn’t tell us what caused those changes. However, research in districts across the country has produced good evidence on approaches that are driving academic gains for students. One intervention has consistently stood out and, in the case of Louisiana and the District of Columbia, has been a pillar of their pandemic-recovery plan: high-dosage tutoring, also known as high-impact tutoring.
Since the start of the pandemic, as many as 80% of U.S. school districts have launched or expanded tutoring programs, investing an estimated $7.5 billion to bring tutoring to millions of students for the first time. At schools that offered high-quality sessions at least three times a week from a consistent tutor seeing just one student or a very small group at a time, students saw their academic achievements skyrocket, recovering on average as much as four months in literacy and nearly 10 months in math over a school year.
The impact of tutoring is felt in every corner of the country: Schools in rural North Carolina counties are tutoring multilingual learners, and New Mexico is providing math tutoring for rural middle schoolers. Meanwhile, Arkansas is building a statewide tutoring corps, and South Dakota is rallying retired teachers to tutor Indigenous students.
It is a rare intervention that parents, teachers, and school leaders alike agree on.
Research is piling up, showcasing how high-dosage tutoring has been effective, even when programs have been expanded beyond a pilot stage to operate across multiple schools, serving thousands of students. Saga Education’s high-dosage tutoring has been implemented within 43 high schools, and the company has supported the Chicago Public Schools Tutor Corps implementation in over 100 schools. Over 20,000 students have been reached.
To be effective, large programs need to maintain a high-quality approach as they grow, and many have. One analysis found that large-scale tutoring programs yield months of additional student learning in a year—more than educational interventions like summer school, class-size reduction, or even extended school days.
It is a rare intervention that parents, teachers, and school leaders alike agree on. But they agree on tutoring. Even as federal pandemic aid has dried up, many states—including Louisiana, Tennessee, Maryland, and Michigan—have chosen to continue investing hundreds of millions of dollars in high-dosage tutoring. In Virginia alone, legislators approved a $418 million increase to the fiscal 2024 state budget for academic recovery, with the vast majority earmarked for high-impact tutoring for students who are furthest behind academically. The effort was organized, in part, by Nicholas Kent, a former deputy education secretary for Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who the White House recently tapped to serve as undersecretary of education.
When the Trump administration elevates leaders who have endorsed the effectiveness of tutoring, it sends a message of widespread confidence in the intervention. Kent would not be the only high-ranking U.S. Department of Education official who hails from a state that’s anchored its recovery efforts in high-impact tutoring.
Penny Schwinn, a former state superintendent of Tennessee now awaiting confirmation as the deputy secretary of education, partly built her reputation by launching a statewide tutoring initiative to accelerate recovery from the pandemic. Under her leadership, the state also strengthened its teacher pipeline and overhauled literacy instruction. The state is among a handful where reading proficiency exceeds pre-pandemic levels.
Meanwhile, Kirsten Baesler of North Dakota, the nation’s longest-serving chief state school officer, is awaiting confirmation as the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. In North Dakota, she oversaw the implementation of high-impact tutoring efforts focused on the lowest-performing 20% of students as well as established a math-acceleration program for students in grades 3-8.
The new administration—alongside school systems, policymakers, and philanthropic leaders—has a critical opportunity to prioritize and scale up high-impact tutoring as a cornerstone of educational recovery and long-term success. The evidence is clear: When it is done right, high-impact tutoring works and can help millions of students. We can realize this potential—a new generation of confident, successful learners—if policymakers embrace what we have learned and commit to embedding high-impact tutoring into U.S. schools for the long run.
