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High-Dosage Tutoring Should Be Here to Stay
Alan Safran is the CEO and co-founder of Saga Education, which helps states and districts with tutoring best practices. Susanna Loeb is the founder and executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University and a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
American parents care deeply about their local schools and are committed to improving education. That’s because Americans know that education plays a crucial role in shaping our children’s future. So the ultimate question is not “should we improve public schools” but “how”?
While the news headlines about the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress felt grim, bright spots bucked the national trends in exciting and promising ways and beg for our attention. These bright spots point us in the right direction, if we’re willing to learn from them.
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Districts still have learning recovery money: Why not spend it on tutoring?
| EdSource
“Lots of other states have helped push tutoring along more than California has. I’m really optimistic that in some ways, it (California) can be a leader, because we’ve learned so much that they could really do it more effectively immediately than we could right at the beginning,” said Susanna Loeb, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education as well as the founder and executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator.
Loeb sees an opportunity for California to jump-start the state’s laggard performance on state and national achievement assessments, especially in early literacy, by creating a second or “Western” wave of tutoring.
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Deliver Results with High-Impact Tutoring
| The National Association of Elementary School Principals
In recent years, “high-impact” tutoring has emerged as a central strategy in the principal’s toolbox for addressing students’ academic needs. As elementary and middle school principals, you might have heard about this approach from district leaders, media, or even students’ families.
But what exactly makes this intervention so powerful? And why should it be integrated into your school’s efforts to support the whole child and close learning gaps?
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NSSA 2025 Conference - Scaling High-Impact Tutoring: Uniting Research and Decision Making for Effective Solutions
| National Student Support Accelerator
We are thrilled to host this annual National Student Support Accelerator event “Scaling High-Impact Tutoring: Uniting Research and Decision Making for Effective Solutions.” It's a big title—but it's exactly what we’re here to do—unite research and decision making.
This conference is a moment I look forward to all year. It’s not just a gathering of experts, educators, policymakers, and innovators. It’s a community that shares a commitment to improving student outcomes, and a belief in one of the most promising, evidence-based strategies in K-12 education today: #highimpacttutoring.
Just a few years ago, we were asking, ‘Can this even work?’—tutoring during the school day for those who need it most. Today, we know the answer is yes. Now, we get to ask, 'How do we make it even better and for more students in more schools?’
Think about where we were four years ago when we knew students could benefit from high-impact tutoring, but we weren’t so sure we could get beneficial programs to students at scale.
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The future is already here: AI and education in 2025
| Stanford Accelerator for Learning
The third Stanford AI+Education Summit brought together researchers, K-12 leaders, educators, and technologists to explore how AI is shaping teaching and learning.
The summit was guided by big questions: What is the future of learning we aspire to? What makes us uniquely human? How do we center humanity in our learning and AI ecosystems? How can research best support a bright future of learning?
The conference featured four expert panels and two rounds of speed talks followed by small group discussions for attendees across sectors to share ideas, opportunities, and challenges. During the lunch hour, AI and education seed grant recipients funded by the Accelerator and HAI shared posters with their in-progress research projects. The Accelerator’s AI Tinkery hosted a pop-up and the Generative AI for Education Hub presented a demo of its new research repository, a tool for education leaders to explore the latest studies on AI and education.
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Stanford Research Hub to Focus on AI for K-12 Education
The new Generative AI for Education Hub at Stanford University will conduct and collect research on AI tools for schools. The hope is to give K-12 leaders easier access to evidence about what works — and what doesn’t.
Stanford University is conducting, collecting and presenting research on the use of generative artificial intelligence for K-12 schools in a new Generative AI for Education Hub online.
As part of a broader university initiative called SCALE — Systems Change Advancing Learning and Equity — the hub includes a research repository for studies on AI for education, where district leaders can search for evidence to inform school investment decisions, with filters such as study design, intended users and AI tool purpose, according to a recent news release. Bite-sized “takeaways” sum up the results, followed by links to each study.
In a field that is too new to offer deep efficacy research, the goal of the research hub is to give educators easy access to the evidence that does exist, fill the gaps with new studies and offer balanced guidance for school systems, according to Generative AI for Education Hub Director Chris Agnew. -
Individualized tutoring can combat chronic absenteeism
A high impact tutoring initiative in Washington, D.C., showed promise for middle schoolers and those with extreme absenteeism, a new report finds.
Dive Brief:
- One-to-one tutoring can lower absenteeism rates by fostering student-teacher relationships and a sense of belonging, making students more willing to go to school, a recent report from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University found.
- The study looked at the High-Impact Tutoring Initiative launched in 2021 to provide math and reading tutoring across 141 Washington, D.C., public K-12 schools — with the greatest focus on serving at-risk students.
- The positive effects were particularly strong for middle school students and students with extreme absenteeism rates in the prior year, who were 13.7% and 7% less likely, respectively, to be absent when tutoring sessions were scheduled, the study found.
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Stanford initiative helps scale what works in education
| Stanford Accelerator for Learning
A decade ago, Professor Susanna Loeb and her research team launched a text messaging program in San Francisco to support early literacy in preschoolers. Tips by Text, which was inspired by a school district collaborator, sent parents timely, evidence-backed advice to build language and reading skills in their children. Studies of the program showed strong learning gains for the children and more parent engagement at home as a result.
Since then, Loeb has built on those promising findings, and expanded the program to serve families of students from various age groups and in districts across the U.S. as well as China, the UK, Denmark, and Singapore.
By all accounts, Tips by Text’s widespread use is a big win for a research-based solution. More often, scholarship-driven tools don’t get beyond the initial classroom in which they were tested, no matter how promising the findings or well-intentioned the scholar and school.
Bringing an effective model from one student to a classroom, district and beyond means many, many more students can reap the benefits of high quality instruction and education innovation including improved academic achievement, enhanced well-being, and stronger, more meaningful engagement in learning. These positive student outcomes spill over into families and communities, creating healthier and more sustainable societies.
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