Armed with $190 billion in COVID-19 recovery funds from the federal government, nearly every state spent at least some of it on tutoring, with more than half adopting standards to ensure districts and schools used high-dosage, high-quality programs. During the 2022-23 school year alone, of federal pandemic aid on tutoring, on top of an estimated spent by districts on such efforts. 

Five years after the pandemic dramatically disrupted learning, with the federal aid now spent, America’s education system is still struggling to regain lost ground. The latest reveal persistent academic gaps, underscoring the urgent need for effective interventions.

Amid all the setbacks, tutoring has broken through as one of the few recovery strategies that states and districts are strategically embedding into their budgets—expanding, refining, and solidifying programs that, in some cases, have delivered significant gains in student achievement. 

Even in these politically divisive times, there’s one thing we can all agree on: Every student deserves the opportunity to build foundational skills in reading, writing, and math that will serve them through life. With nearly $1 trillion spent on education each year, we must ensure that investment translates into real educational opportunities that lead to good jobs and meaningful lives. 

High-dosage tutoring delivered during the school day from a consistent, well-trained tutor is the . In Rapid City, South Dakota, a group of retired teachers come to Title I schools each day to work as tutors, one-on-one with predominantly indigenous students. In Harrison, Colorado, paraprofessionals tutor students — and become so inspired by the academic success that they become full-time teachers themselves through innovative educator apprenticeship models. In Springfield, Ohio, aspiring teachers tutor local elementary school students building their skills while shoring up those of their students.

Over the past two decades, our organizations have dedicated significant resources to studying, supporting, and scaling this approach. Not only are we optimistic about what we are seeing, but we are firmly convinced that school systems, policymakers, and philanthropic leaders must double down on their commitment and investment to this transformative work.

This belief is driven by significant progress and success across several key areas: continued on tutoring outcomes; from parents and teachers and schools; viable paths to affordable delivery at scale; new models that solve of time, people, and money; better understanding of policies and data systems that improve tutoring delivery; and a with the potential for significant breakthroughs.  

High-dosage tutoring is uniquely effective in helping students learn, including when implemented at scale. A by University of Virginia researcher Beth Schueler, along with Brown University’s Matthew A. Kraft and Grace T. Falken, analyzed 282 randomized control trials and found that large-scale tutoring programs yield months of additional student learning per year, though effectiveness diminished as programs scale beyond 1,000 students. Yet even large-scale tutoring results were stronger than educational interventions like summer school, class size reduction, and extended school days. Additionally, of continue to find , even in challenging learning conditions. 

Importantly, schools and parents want more tutoring in their schools. The most of school leaders found that high-dosage tutoring implementation increased again last year, growing from 39% of schools in 2022-23 to 46% of schools in 2023-24. This is not just a fleeting post-pandemic trend — schools are investing in tutoring even as federal relief funding winds down, because tutoring is wildly popular with parents. In Louisiana, high-dosage tutoring outperformed every other education policy polled, with an astonishing 90% approval. 

Despite our prevailing partisan politics, the push for more tutoring comes from red and blue states, from city systems and rural counties – with whether tutoring is the next big bipartisan school reform. 

Arkansas passed regulations outlining the characteristics of quality tutoring and requiring student-level reporting of delivery so that the state can manage implementation, elevate best practices, and support struggling schools. Baltimore City Public Schools is currently tutoring over 10,000 students through partnerships with external tutoring providers and a district-run program using paraprofessionals. 

Pitt County, North Carolina partnered with to provide critical tutors to multilingual learners, using technology to deliver services in students’ native languages, including even American Sign Language, in rural schools. And New Mexico is expanding virtual middle school math tutoring statewide, breaking down barriers to access for students in rural areas. 

Federal pandemic aid may be gone, but state appropriators are putting money where they’re seeing progress: Virginia added for academic recovery, with on high-dosage tutoring for its students who are furthest behind academically. Maryland stood up a $28 million middle school math tutoring program for underserved students. And in state funds last year for intensive tutoring.

Finally, we are at the very beginning of a wave of innovation fueled by emerging technologies like AI. Innovation through has helped of tutoring as well as . The months of learning from past studies will soon come from without losing the ability to personalize tutoring sessions, support tutoring quality, and maintain program effectiveness in student learning. 

Collectively, our organizations, and other like-minded organizations such as the National Student Support Accelerator and Saga Education, have supported tutoring delivery to hundreds of thousands of students, have launched and published dozens of studies on tutoring, and have infused tens of millions of dollars into the space to spur innovation and capture learning. But we still have more work to do. 

Five years after the pandemic began, students remain behind where they should be, and the gaps between Black and Latino students and their peers are . Federal relief funding that allowed districts to try new things has run out. And yet the evidence has never been clearer: High-dosage tutoring works and can help millions of students. But without action, this critical intervention risks being lost to politics, budget cuts and inertia. There is with continued investment in high-dosage tutoring. 

We must double down on evidence-based strategies, reject fatalism, and embrace the urgency of this moment. The latest NAEP scores confirm what’s at stake. States, districts, and funders must step up to ensure that every student who needs tutoring gets it. This isn’t just an investment in students – it’s an investment in our country’s future.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and The 74.

High-dosage, in-person tutoring gets , recent research suggests. But as federal funding for remediation dries up and schools struggle to raise students’ post-COVID skills, educators have been hoping for a lifeline in the form of live, online tutoring.

While virtual tutors still work directly with students in real time, they can work from anywhere, expanding the potential talent pool and lowering costs.

Until recently, virtual tutoring had that it works very well, with few rigorous studies of its effectiveness. But new findings, including two recent studies from Johns Hopkins University’s , are beginning to offer a different narrative: Done well and with the same safeguards as traditional in-person tutoring, the virtual version can be nearly as good.

“I was always one of those people who was so skeptical — ‘it’s never going to work,’” said Amanda Neitzel, an assistant professor at Hopkins and the research center’s deputy director. “And then I did these studies, and I was shocked, because it did work.”

In a quasi-experimental study , Neitzel and her colleagues found that first-graders in Massachusetts who used , a one-to-one virtual tutoring program, made substantial progress in reading, with the percentage of students reading on grade level rising from just 16% in the fall to about 50% by spring.

The share of “struggling” readers also dropped, from 64% in the fall to 28% by the spring.

The study tracked about 1,900 students in 13 high-poverty Massachusetts school districts in the 2023-24 school year. The data suggest that tutored students showed nearly five-and-a-half months’ more progress on a key reading test than the typical student. And they improved across the board, with English learners, students with disabilities and low-income students all gaining ground.

Ignite tutors work with students for 15 minutes every day, typically during “literacy blocks” in class or in separate, staff-monitored rooms.

In a separate, more rigorous study , Neitzel and her colleagues found that students who got online tutoring outperformed their peers by about two points on NWEA reading assessments, a “significant” change that would raise the average student slightly to the 55th percentile in the class, or just above average.

While researchers saw no difference in impacts for English language learners or those with special needs, they found that first-graders got more out of the tutoring, meaning that the hypothetical 50th-percentile student who got tutoring would rise to the 58th percentile.

Six elementary schools in a district in Texas took part in the randomized controlled trial evaluating Air Reading for 418 first-through-sixth-grade students during the 2023-24 school year. The small-group tutoring ran for just a few months in the spring, from late January through April.

Neitzel said the effect sizes in the two new studies aren’t necessarily as large as those of the most effective in-person models, but the new evidence provides some of the most compelling evidence yet for schools wondering whether they should offer virtual tutoring. 

“It’s really exciting that every month or two there’s another out,” she said. “And there are more in the field right now too. So I think in the next couple years, we’ll be able to answer that question better.”

Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, agreed, saying several to amount to “ on the efficacy of virtual tutoring programs,” suggesting they hold promise.

He noted that randomized control trials generally find that virtual tutoring has positive effects, but often of smaller magnitude than those found in meta-analyses of in-person tutoring programs. “However, the devil is in the specific program design details,” he said. For instance, several studies find that one-on-one virtual tutoring is more effective than programs that use small groups.

Jennifer Krajewski, director of outreach and engagement for , a clearinghouse for research-proven tutoring models housed at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Research and Reform in Education, noted that both Air Reading and Ignite Reading employ well-trained live tutors and a “highly structured” program, with ongoing coaching for tutors and a clear instructional process that addresses students’ individual needs. These characteristics, she said, are often part of in-person tutoring programs that have been found effective.

Both programs work hard at getting students to actually attend, she and Neitzel said. 

Reviewing the Ignite study, Neitzel said the percentage of students actually receiving tutoring when they were supposed to was “shockingly high,” topping 85% for the vast majority of students. That suggests implementation is key in a field where attendance isn’t always tracked very well. 

“You could have the best model in the world, but if the kids aren’t actually there, it’s not going to move the needle,” she said.

Attendance remains one of virtual tutoring’s biggest challenges, she said. “When it’s a physical person in the building, they can pull you out of class. It’s harder to avoid. Whereas if it’s on a computer, you just don’t log in — or you log off, or [you say], ‘Oh, it’s not working.’ ”

Krajewski said that for the study, Ignite worked with a local funder in Massachusetts to hire on-the-ground workers who ensured that students were showing up. It also held regular virtual meetings with educators “to make sure everyone understood the milestones and the goals,” ensuring that the program would be launched consistently across several districts. “Everyone was really on the same page because of these meetings,” she said.

Ignite and the local funder also appointed paid school and district “champions” to supervise implementation. Each school champion worked about three hours weekly to troubleshoot problems that arose. And they required that schools review student achievement data weekly, moving students out of tutoring when they succeeded and filling those seats with struggling students. 

Neitzel said one of the keys to Ignite’s success, at least in the study, was that it paired students with tutors who spoke the same language, offering “a little connection” between them, even if tutoring took place primarily in English.

If schools can’t find enough bilingual teachers locally, she said, “maybe virtual tutoring is the best option you have.” In-person tutoring programs might be slightly more effective, she said, but virtual programs offer flexibility on hiring and other challenging aspects of implementation. 

In the Air Reading study, Neitzel said, company representatives met with schools every other week, focusing closely on attendance and which students weren’t attending sessions.

On occasion, she said, Air Reading teams flew out to schools “to make sure stuff was happening and getting set up or trying to troubleshoot what’s going on. I was impressed with just how well they knew the schools they were working with.”

In one case, she recalled an Air Reading worker who was so attuned to the school he oversaw that he knew an attendance monitor’s father had died. “That’s how involved they are with this,” Neitzel said. “When it works well, there are these tremendous relationships with people in the district to make it work.”

Krajewski, who was not an author on either study, said researchers haven’t yet seen evidence of effectiveness for tutoring using AI agents working directly with students. “We’ve seen that the most effective models use human tutors,” she said. 

Hopkins researchers are working on an evaluation of an AI-assisted tutoring model developed by Carnegie Mellon University and predicted there’d be noteworthy data by the end of 2025. “But even then, it’s not that the tutoring is replaced by AI,” she said. The AI, she said, is helping human tutors be more effective.

“These studies show how important that human tutor continues to be,” she said. “We’re learning that that human tutor, virtual or in person, is driving the instructional process.” 

Correction: An earlier version of this story included graphics that mischaracterized the amount of benefit students gained from the two virtual tutoring programs.