Last September, Savannah-Chatham County public schools tried out an intensive new tutoring program to help struggling readers catch up before state reading tests at the end of 3rd grade. By winter, the Georgia district’s leaders knew the intervention worked—but, in a sense, it was coming too late.
The 100 2nd and 3rd graders grew their reading proficiency through daily sessions so significantly that “we took a step back and asked ourselves, where is this going to have major ripple effects?” said Shraddha Nunziata, Savannah-Chatham’s senior director of special projects and initiatives, who supervised the pilot with Ignite Reading.
Now, the district will intervene much earlier, to inoculate students against reading problems rather than trying to remediate later. This month, the district is shifting the pilot to begin tutoring 500 kindergarteners and 1st graders. (The district will continue tutoring the older students through the end of the school year.)
“We have fully bought into this idea that if we really want all of our kids to be readers, we need to hyper-focus foundational literacy efforts to ensure our kids are reading on benchmark at the end of first grade,” Nunziata said.
New lessons about how to deploy tutoring
Tutoring has been the focus of learning-recovery initiatives following the pandemic, but many districts have struggled to sustain the labor-intensive and expensive intervention after federal recovery grants ended, and others have seen minimal effects from the programs, largely due to implementation challenges. That reality has pushed districts to reconsider not just whether tutoring works, but when it works best.
Emerging evidence on Ignite Reading and similar programs suggests virtual tutoring can be as effective as in-person tutoring at filling basic literacy skills gaps, though not always less costly. The nonprofit National Student Support Accelerator, which studies tutoring models, estimates high-intensity in-person tutoring programs typically cost $1,000 to $3,000 per student, with some programs topping $4,000 per student. Ignite Reading averages $2,500 per student, including technology and staff support.
Researchers say the key lesson may be timing. Districts still must be willing to invest money, time, and support for the intervention during the “critical window” of early reading development, rather than focusing on remediation at later grades.
Tutoring is expensive, so it makes more sense for schools to focus it on emerging readers rather than using it only later, for remediation, said Amanda Neitzel, a senior researcher an assistant research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Research and Reform in Education. “The hope is, long-term, if kids are reading proficiently, there’ll be other savings in the system that make up for this.”
The new findings that point towards a more effective use of virtual tutoring come from the latest results of an ongoing, quasi-experimental evaluation of Ignite Reading in 13 high-poverty Massachusetts school districts. Neitzel and her colleagues tracked the reading progress of nearly 1,600 1st graders across the districts who received individual, virtual tutoring in 2023-24 through Ignite Reading. Their progress was compared at the end of 1st and 2nd grades both to a nationally normed sample of 1st graders who participated in DIBELS—a benchmark early-literacy test—and a matched sample of more than 500 tutored and non-tutored 1st graders in four of the districts.
After a year, 48% of the Massachusetts 1st graders across the 13 districts who participated in the tutoring performed at or above grade level in foundational reading skills on the DIBELS, a commonly used literacy test. That was up from only 6% of 1st graders meeting the benchmark before tutoring. On average, tutored students made roughly the equivalent of five months more progress in reading than the national norm. Tutored students also significantly outperformed the control group of students in the districts who did not receive tutoring.
Among the students who mastered those early literacy skills by the end of 1st grade, 85% still read on grade level at the end of 2nd grade, without any additional tutoring. By contrast, only 12% of 1st graders who didn’t reach proficiency in early literacy after a year of tutoring were reading on grade level a year later without more intensive help.
The persistence of gains has strengthened arguments for shifting tutoring earlier, said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, the founder of Ignite Reading, said the company has started “beating the drum” about prioritizing tutoring on the earliest grades.
“There’s a notion that kids have until 3rd grade to learn to read and that’s simply not correct,” Sliwerski said. If students don’t learn to read on time by the end of 1st grade, she added, “it is more expensive and very difficult to remediate your way out of this problem.”
Individual tutoring has helped correct Savannah-Chatham students’ “reading DNA,” Nunziata said. “We found students had one or two or three letter sounds that they weren’t mastering,” she said. “Going back in and patching up those holes in [students’] basic alphabetic knowledge allowed them to move faster through the curriculum.”
What makes for effective virtual tutoring?
The most effective virtual tutoring programs, Neitzel said, have hewed closely to the same practices used in successful in-person tutoring: frequent individual sessions with a trained tutor who works with the same students consistently enough to build rapport, and focuses on a sequenced curriculum to fill specific gaps in their reading skills.
“It has to be built into the literacy block because we want high attendance to make sure that the kids are getting it every day,” said Almundena Abeyta, the superintendent of Chelsea, Mass. public schools, which participated in the Johns Hopkins study.
Ignite Reading students, for example, received on average 33 hours of tutoring over 36 weeks, meeting for 15 minutes every day with the same tutor over the course of the year.
Camilo Machado-Cleary, the principal of Sokolowski Elementary School in Chelsea, said he was initially skeptical about allowing virtual tutoring in early grades. “It meant some of our most vulnerable students would have more screen time and not be connected to an adult in the building,” he said.
But the results and high engagement with tutors shows that the time is being spent intentionally, he said.
Tutored Massachusetts students in the Johns Hopkins study maintained 85% attendance—unusually high for tutoring—and this year, the program also added a system that automatically recruits a substitute if an assigned tutor is late to a session.
“The training equips you to jump into any session and pull up the information that you need within a minute or so,” said Natalia Berrios, an Ignite Reading tutor who works with students in both Massachusetts and Georgia. “It’s basically so no student is ever left without a tutor.”
In fact, Abeyta said she has been working with Ignite Reading to get aligned professional development for her own teachers.
Sokolowski Elementary serves a large population of newcomer students, and Machado-Cleary said staffing constraints make intensive one-on-one support difficult to provide internally.
Some states are stepping up. Massachusetts and Louisiana have launched grant programs to help districts pay for wide-scale intensive tutoring.
For example, the Chelsea schools leveraged study results showing tutored students made nearly six months more reading progress than expected, helping it secure part of the state’s $25 million high-dosage tutoring grants.
Ignite Reading, which launched in 2019, has expanded rapidly to serve more than 50,000 students in 22 states. Neitzel warned, though, that even virtual intensive tutoring may not be financially sustainable for schools with high concentrations of students who are years behind grade level in reading. Those students likely need long-term support.
“Just from a resource perspective and an efficiency perspective, we’re not going to tutor our way out of this,” Neitzel said, referring to schools with wide-scale reading delays. “We need to take a hard look at what’s happening in the classroom. Systemically, what do we need to do so that those teachers can get most of those kids reading?”
