5 reasons your tutoring program may fail this school year

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Anthony Salcito
Anthony Salcitohttps://www.nerdy.com/
Anthony Salcito, chief institution business officer, leads Varsity Tutors for Schools and is responsible for Nerdy’s efforts to support institutions as they work to transform learning opportunities for students and educators across a range of offerings. Prior to joining Nerdy, Anthony served as vice president of worldwide education at Microsoft.

More than 80% of schools across the country have spent billions of dollars in federal aid to establish and expand tutoring programs in order to close significant achievement gaps that widened in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic—especially for children from low-income families, so many of whom were already furthest behind.

A growing body of research underscores the game-changing impact of tutoring, when designed and delivered according to evidence-based practices known as high-dosage tutoring. At schools that provided tutoring sessions multiple times a week with the same tutor over the course of several months, students saw their academic achievements skyrocket, recovering on average as much as four months in literacy and nearly 10 months in math.

But along the way, it’s become clear that not all tutoring is equal. “High-dosage tutoring” became more of a marketing buzzword than a reliable indicator of program quality. The effectiveness of tutoring varies widely. Schools and districts face diverse challenges—from recruiting challenges to scheduling logistics—and what proves effective in one setting may not work in another.


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As the deadline to spend the last of federal pandemic relief aid dollars looms, we must examine the pitfalls to ensure the longevity and success of tutoring programs across the country.

Implementing a high-dosage tutoring program within a school district requires careful planning and investment. While building a district-driven program may be appealing, there are several areas to consider that may make partnering with a vendor to launch and run the program more feasible, affordable and effective.

Here are five reasons why many district tutoring efforts fall short:

1. Struggle to Find Enough—or the Right—Tutors

Finding great subject matter experts to work consistently in the model that high-dosage tutoring requires (2 to 3 sessions per week consistently for at least 10 weeks) is not easy. Many students need individualized instruction support, so the volume of ready tutors needs to be large and flexible.

In conversations with hundreds of district leaders who have tried to build tutoring programs from scratch, I’ve heard common frustrations that there are simply not enough tutors. Most have been bound by geography, faced shortages in high-demand fields or lacked tutors that spoke a student’s native language. When building brick-and-mortar programs, these can all be huge—even insurmountable—challenges.

Some have tried to solve this problem by utilizing their own teachers and other school staff to serve as tutors, failing to recognize that many teachers already feel overworked and do not have the time or a desire to tutor.

Savvy districts are building a hybrid tutoring workforce—leaning on a combination of online, yet face-to-face video-based tutors and cultivating partnerships with local colleges to tap college students and the local business community. For many schools, this hybrid strategy provides a bigger and more diverse tutor pool from which to pull, in addition to being a great opportunity to leverage subject-matter experts with whom students may not otherwise come into contact.

This strategy is also crucial to expanding tutoring programs and adopting the mind shift that tutoring shouldn’t only be for the 8% to 10% of students who are struggling the most academically and need intensive tutoring—but for all students throughout the entire school year.

2. Tutoring Becomes a Scheduling and Logistical Challenge

Consistency matters. The research is clear: Students benefit the most from consistent tutoring embedded into the school day.

Many schools struggle to manage complex tutoring schedules that account for students’ and tutors’ schedules. And logistical hurdles abound for in-person sessions, including directions, transportation, weather and parking—to name just a few. These challenges make maintaining consistency of attendance for students and tutors difficult to sustain and severely complicates the already complex task of providing accurate reporting and evidence of impact for large programs.

The challenge is even greater in small group tutoring models (typically four to five students). In these models, regular monitoring needs to be done if the group of students matched to a tutor needs to be rematched if one or more students are learning at a faster or slower pace.

To support this, schools need strong technology infrastructure that can leverage matching algorithms to not only sync student and tutor schedules and anticipate last-minute staffing gaps but to intelligently connect each student to the right instructor, based on their unique needs. In addition, active data needs to be collected on student learning mastery throughout the engagement to feed the matching algorithms to make recommendations on change.

3. Mismatch Between Classroom Curriculum and Tutoring

I often hear educators’ frustration that students show up to class saying a tutor taught them how to do something—solve an algebra equation or diagram an essay—in a different way than they are teaching it in class. Not only can it be frustrating for the educator, but confusing for the student as they work through the school curriculum.

Districts seeking to partner with an organization to provide tutoring support should seek out programs that don’t operate using their own curriculum and pedagogical point of views, and instead work with the district’s and collaborate with teachers. In order for the tutoring to be effective, as well as to build trust and get maximum buy-in from teachers, tutoring programs need to meet students where they are, using the standards, curriculum and classroom materials they’re already using.

Programs that are content agnostic have managed to side-step this particular challenge more easily. Even better: A program that allows teachers to collaborate directly with tutors and mark exactly where in their class lesson a student needs additional support. Whether virtual or in-person, educators should also receive notes from a student’s tutoring session so that they have insight into how students are progressing during tutoring sessions, or where they are continuing to struggle.

4. Students Are Disengaged Because They Feel Singled Out

Students are sometimes unfairly stigmatized for needing tutoring and it can negatively impact self-esteem, especially if the same chronically low-performing or special needs students are being pulled out of classrooms every day.

But imagine a learning environment in which tutoring and academic enrichment outside of instructional time is part of a school’s culture. Schools where all students receive tutoring support of some – even students who are at and above grade-level, who might participate in a Minecraft coding camp or SAT preparation. Schools and districts that embrace a tutoring-for-all mentality are flipping the script on tutoring, transforming it into a widely accepted and normalized way of learning among students.

5. Parents Aren’t Seen as Part of the Solution

Since the onset of remote learning, an increasing number of families are advocating for greater access to tutoring and seeking clarity on its implementation for their children. They are keen to understand their role in helping their kids stay on track and address unfinished learning.

To ensure the success of tutoring programs, districts must establish mechanisms that engage parents and all stakeholders—teachers, tutors, students and families—from the very beginning.

Federal pandemic relief aid dries up at the end of September, but both Democratic-led and Republican-led states have already dedicated funding in their own budgets to continue tutoring programs. There’s even some chatter about tutoring becoming the next big bipartisan school reform.

But to ensure tutoring is impactful, to ensure its staying power and to ensure we meet the moment and take full advantage of the opportunities high-quality and high-dosage tutoring present for students, we must recognize and safeguard against the challenges that have caused tutoring programs to sputter and districts to walk away from the promise they hold.

The future of learning will include more individualized instruction incorporated into the teaching workflow provided by schools. The evidence is clear…high-dosage tutoring has emerged as a promising intervention to address educational disparities and accelerate student learning, for one great reason – proven results backed by evidence. It’s now time to integrate thoughtful models that are affordable, sustainable, and complement the work of educators in the classroom.

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