The White House has exceeded its goal of recruiting 250,000 mentors and tutors to support students’ academic recovery in K-12 schools, according to a new report.
But it remains to be seen how much impact those services will have on student learning, as schools continue to grapple with stagnant academic achievement and chronic absenteeism and as federal funding that supported such initiatives winds down.
In 2022, the Biden administration launched the National Partnership for Student Success, an initiative meant to help overcome learning gaps. The effort centered around recruiting people to serve as mentors, tutors, student success coaches, counselors, and in other student support roles at schools around the country. At the time, President Joe Biden set a goal of recruiting 250,000 people into these roles by 2025.
As of last spring, the initiative had brought in an estimated 323,000 new mentors, tutors, college and career counselors, and learning coaches—including volunteers and some who were paid—to work with students at school, according to the results of a set of surveys conducted by the RAND Corporation as part of the initiative. The two surveys, which were conducted in spring 2023 and spring 2024, each asked over 1,000 principals about the services their schools provide. RAND researchers weighted the responses to produce a nationally representative sample of K-12 principals, according to a report on the survey findings.
The U.S. Department of Education partnered with AmeriCorps and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University to recruit adults to help address academic decline in schools.
Students’ math and reading scores plummeted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many schools shifted to remote learning, some for an entire school year. Results of the spring 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, showed 4th and 8th grade students testing on par with students in the 1990s, erasing two decades of progress in reading and math. And in the two years following the NAEP results, academic recovery has stalled with students in most grades losing academic ground compared to their pre-pandemic peers, according to NWEA, the testing group that runs MAP-Growth. At the same time, students’ needs for mental health support have intensified, and chronic absenteeism has risen.
With the national partnership initiative, the Biden administration aimed to help schools provide additional one-on-one support for students by prompting partnerships among nonprofits, colleges and universities, and school districts.
“I’m really most proud of the fact that we came up with a vision and a dream about how to alleviate the burden for teachers,” Cindy Marten, deputy secretary of education, said during an Oct. 10 White House event to celebrate the number of tutors and mentors who stepped up. “The recovery from the pandemic can not just be on the backs of teachers.”
Schools are providing more tutoring and academic support than in the past
Ninety percent of the principals in both RAND surveys said they provide at least one of the following services: high-intensity tutoring, mentoring, student success coaching, wraparound supports, or college and career advising.
In the spring 2024 survey, most principals—60 percent—said they provided wraparound supports at their schools, such as mental and physical health care and other non-academic services. Over 50 percent of respondents said they provide high-intensity tutoring—delivered either virtually or in person at least 90 minutes per week—and 50 percent said they provided mentoring. Fewer principals—27 percent—said they provide student success coaching, periodic, one-on-one support for students that combines academic and social-emotional help.
“Those are the people-intensive roles,” Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center, said during the White House event. “You’ve got to have often 10 people, 15 people, [per school] doing those roles to reach the scale you need, and that’s a challenge for schools.”
In the 2024 survey, 28 percent of principals said the number of adults serving as tutors, mentors, postsecondary advisers, or wraparound support providers increased from the 2022-23 school year.
A third of the 2024 survey respondents said they were able to provide high-intensity tutoring to more students in the 2023-24 school year than in the year prior, and 24 percent said the same of mentoring.
Where volunteers came from
The White House turned to AmeriCorps, a federal agency that deploys corps members who earn a small stipend to nonprofits and works with state agencies focused on community service, to recruit the bulk of people for the tutoring and mentoring effort. Depending on the nonprofit and program, the people volunteering as mentors, tutors, or coaches could be paid or unpaid.
With the launch of the National Partnership for Student Success in 2022, AmeriCorps provided $20 million through its Volunteer Generation Fund to help nonprofits like Big Brothers Big Sisters, Boys and Girls clubs, and 4-H to recruit volunteers for schools. That’s in addition to 54,000 AmeriCorps members and other volunteers who helped with school readiness activities in the 2023-24 school year. According to the survey, 43 percent of schools partnered with local nonprofits to get more people in student support roles in 2023-24.
College students were another major source of tutors and mentors. Last year, the Education Department released a “dear colleague” letter calling on colleges and universities to use Federal Work-Study Program funds to pay students to serve as mentors, tutors, student success coaches, and wraparound support coordinators for school-age children in their communities.
Over 50 colleges have since committed to using work-study funding for that purpose, Balfanz said. Twenty percent of principals in the 2024 survey said they partnered with a local college to have college students serve in student support roles, according to the report. Among those respondents, 32 percent said they used more college students than they had in the prior year.
“We knew that was a huge untapped source,” Balfanz said. “To be honest, we tried this once before in a past administration, and we didn’t get the pickup. But post-pandemic, things had changed. There was a different tone. The colleges were willing. The kids were willing.”
The strategy is “a lasting pipeline,” Balfanz added, since the work-study program is a fully funded federal program that won’t go away without an act of Congress.
Student need for extra academic support remains high, despite increased services
The increase in services doesn’t mean every student who needs extra support is receiving it. In the 2024 survey, one-third of principals said that only some of the students who needed tutoring, mentoring, or wraparound services were receiving them.
In the 2023-24 school year, 38 percent of principals reported an increased need for wraparound supports, 32 percent said there was an increased need for tutoring, and 30 percent said the same for mentoring. Few principals reported that their students’ level of need had decreased.
In the 2024 survey, principals identified chronic absenteeism as a key challenge. Nearly two-thirds said they need more people to provide support to address chronic absenteeism.
Over half of the principals—53 percent—said they are using services such as mental or physical health care provided at school to draw students and their families to school and help reduce chronic absenteeism. Forty-five percent said they use mentoring to help address it and 30 percent said they use tutoring, which research shows can increase attendance. Twenty-five percent said they use student success coaches, who help students with social-emotional skills, college planning, and academics.
“When we started this work, the real focus—as it should be—was learning loss,” Balfanz said. “That’s still at the forefront, but we know, as we started to see the data on attendance, that the post-pandemic chronic absenteeism even challenged some of that work to reduce learning loss.”
