By Susanna Loeb and Monica Bhatt
As education researchers, we hear directly from district leaders about the realities they and their teams face every day. Leading a school district means weighing competing priorities and managing resources, while finding space for new ideas that promise to strengthen teaching and learning.
Each of these efforts has value and reflects a commitment to improvement. Yet amid the churn of initiatives, it’s worth remembering the strategies that have been proven to work time and again.
Tutoring is one of those strategies. Far from a passing trend that fades after a year, high-impact tutoring is a unicorn in the oft-changing tides of education reform: it is both a centuries-old, pedagogically sound and educator-approved way to teach children, and it’s an approach proven by hundreds of rigorous studies over decades.
At the heart of high-impact tutoring is a way to give students what teachers have always known they need: instruction tailored to them, delivered reliably. When it is done right—small groups, frequent sessions, consistent tutors, aligned curriculum—the results are striking. Tutoring works, producing some of the biggest learning gains of any intervention.
The challenge isn’t whether tutoring is effective. It is. The question is whether students get enough of it for the gains to register.
That’s a logistics problem—but one we can solve. The evidence is clear: the more minutes of high-quality tutoring students get, the more they learn.
That means district leaders aren’t facing an unsolvable mystery. They are facing a set of concrete design choices, and research, funding streams and partnerships already exist to help them make the right ones.
5 tutoring non-negotiables
In 2023–24, the University of Chicago Education Lab’s Personalized Learning Initiative followed more than 17,000 students across eight programs. The core takeaway? More tutoring minutes yielded more learning—across in-person and virtual delivery, different grades, and multiple curricula—so long as tutoring happened during the school day.
The problem with programs where students learned less wasn’t effectiveness, it was dosage. Students simply didn’t get enough minutes. That’s not a flaw in tutoring itself; it’s a logistics gap we can close.
Intensive tutoring remains one of a district’s best bets for learning, with robust impact per minute. The main barrier is getting enough students enough minutes—and “minutes” is a concrete and actionable piece to measure and manage.
So how do we do it? A decade of rigorous research—summarized in this brief by National Student Support Accelerator researchers—converges on several non-negotiables:
- High frequency and time: At least three sessions per week, with a clear plan to ensure attendance.
- Small groups: Ideally 1:1, but up to 3:1 still produces positive results.
- Consistent, trained tutors: Tutors need preparation and ongoing support, and students need to see the same tutor regularly.
- In-school scheduling: Tutoring that takes place during the school day is better attended and more equitable.
- Alignment of tutoring to the curriculum: Sessions should connect directly to core classroom instruction.
When districts stray from these guardrails—larger groups, sporadic scheduling, rotating tutors, after-school slots with low attendance—benefits shrink.
Tutoring cannot remain a side project. If we agree the main barrier is logistics, then the path forward is not to debate tutoring’s value but to focus on supporting districts to implement it well.
When built into the daily fabric of instruction, aligned with curriculum, and supported by strong systems, it becomes one of the most powerful tools we have to change outcomes.
Here are a few concrete steps leaders can take:
1. Train and support a broader tutor workforce. Effective programs leverage paraprofessionals, college students, virtual tutors and community members with structured training, which expands the labor pool while addressing staffing shortages.
2. Use registered apprenticeships to grow—and fund—the pipeline. The U.S. Department of Labor now recognizes “tutor” as a registered apprenticeship occupation, which unlocks federal and state dollars to pay and train tutors. The New Jersey Tutoring Corps is already leading the way, using apprenticeship funds to hire tutors, provide college credit through New Jersey City University, and create a pathway into the teaching profession.
3. Don’t do this alone—find peers and experts in the education community to help. States and districts can take advantage of structured technical assistance to design tutoring well from the start. For example, the nonprofit Results for America and the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University have run High-Impact Tutoring Design Sprints to help districts tackle scheduling, staffing, and cost challenges head-on.
The nonprofit MDRC published a brief with implementation advice given by educators. Accelerate offers tutoring fellowships on the state-level. And NSSA also offers free playbooks, tools, and advising.
The strongest tool we have
Tutoring falters when it’s treated as a side project. It thrives when it’s built into the daily rhythm of school and treated as essential, not optional.
It is not a silver bullet—but it is the strongest tool we have to accelerate learning, particularly for the students who have fallen furthest behind.
For district leaders who do the work to integrate and sustain high-impact tutoring with fidelity, the reward is worth it: students who learn more, teachers who see progress, and schools that deliver on the promise of recovery and growth.
