Since the COVID-19 pandemic, tutoring has emerged as a major strategy for improving student outcomes. Building on a strong body of existing research, strategic system leadership, and deliberate policy action, districts across the country have implemented high-impact tutoring programs aligned with evidence-based structures. In this brief, high-impact tutoring refers to tutoring that is frequent, sustained, delivered individually or in small groups, and grounded in evidence-aligned instruction.

Early implementation was supported by large investments from local, state, federal, and philanthropic sources as educators worked to mitigate the academic impacts of COVID-19. The largest of these investments was the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER), a $190 billion federal investment to support school reopenings and address the educational impacts of the pandemic. As of March 2024, the Council of Chief State School Officers estimated that $4.4 billion of ESSER funds had been spent on tutoring and learning acceleration, with spending on tutoring increasing as districts shifted from pandemic triage to addressing student learning needs.

As ESSER funds were sunsetting, some speculated that the broader tutoring movement would stall because districts would be unable to sustain the costs of programs they had built. Disruptions in the tutoring provider market and pauses in district programs added to those concerns. In our analysis of nationally representative survey data from the School Pulse Panel (National Center for Education Statistics), we found that district tutoring activity decreased slightly as the window to access ESSER funds closed. However, those national trends offer only a partial picture. Rather than producing a uniform “tutoring cliff,” the end of ESSER appears to have created a sorting point, with districts pursuing different paths as they adjusted to a new funding reality.