Realizing the Promise of High Dosage Tutoring at Scale

This paper reports on initial lessons learned from work on the Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI), partnering with four large education agencies around the country over the past several years. The goal of the PLI, an initiative led by the University of Chicago Education Lab in collaboration with MDRC and researchers from the University of Toronto and Stanford University, is to understand whether and how we can scale the benefits of high dosage tutoring such that more students might benefit. 

Presented here are findings here from the 2022-23 academic year with four education agencies around the country that we partnered with or tried to partner with: Chicago Public Schools (CPS), Illinois; Fulton County Schools, Georgia; the New Mexico Public Education Department; and a mid-sized urban school district in California. The lessons are of interest partly because each agency tried to follow the recommendation of US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona about how to deploy their ESSER dollars to overcome pandemic learning loss by using the strategy that’s long been recognized as the best way to teach anyone anything: high dosage tutoring (Nickow et al., 2024).

The data show this type of tutoring can double or even triple what students learn in a year (Guryan et al., 2023). Whether this type of tutoring can be scaled in the aftermath of the pandemic is an open question. Many schools have struggled to deal with the logistics of re-opening and have experienced declining enrollment, chronic absenteeism, and worsening mental health crises among young people. Exacerbating matters is the labor shortage felt by industries across the economy, including schools. Education agencies attempted to scale up tutoring in this environment more quickly and at a larger scale than had previously been attempted. Districts often were adapting tutoring program parameters to fit their local context but without any guidance about which program design features are essential (versus unnecessary) to promote student learning.

The two sites that focused on out-of-school tutoring – New Mexico and a midsized California district – failed to get high levels of student participation. The California district tried to integrate tutoring into its after-school program, which faltered due to low student participation in the after-school program itself. New Mexico tried to get students to do virtual tutoring at home, but recruitment was difficult. New Mexico has subsequently pivoted to incorporating tutoring into the school day and we will be assessing the efficacy of that model in the coming year. 

The results are more encouraging for the two districts that used ESSER funding to incorporate tutoring during the school day from the start – Chicago Public Schools and Fulton County Schools: Results from the 2022-23 academic year suggest that tutoring can be scaled and can work, even in the aftermath of the pandemic. Students who participated in tutoring saw large and positive gains on end-of-year test scores, at least in math; the results for reading are not yet conclusive. The impact on math scores is equivalent to about twothirds of a year of learning, which would be enough to totally undo the effects of the pandemic for the average student. The impact on reading scores is still too noisy to know how big the effect is so far.