The second full school year (2023-24) of the OSSE High Impact Tutoring Initiative expanded the reach of an already ambitious program. The Initiative served 7,274 students, approximately 8% of students in DC schools and 12% of students classified at-risk. The Initiative was able to increase participation by 2,000 students from its first year of implementation while also increasing the successful targeting of at-risk students who stand to benefit most from the program. The Initiative also increased the average dosage level to 33.86 sessions. Collectively, this is a significant improvement in program scale and program delivery, ensuring that increases in tutoring continue to serve students who are most in need of potential benefits.

In Year 1, we found that tutoring had a strong positive effect on student attendance, even compared with interventions that are specifically designed for chronic absenteeism (detailed findings here). We continue to find evidence of a positive impact of OSSE-funded HIT on school attendance. After accounting for confounding factors related to the day of scheduled sessions and school absences, we find tutored students were more likely to attend school on days when sessions were scheduled, an effect that was particularly pronounced for younger grades and for students who are currently attending school 70-90% of the time. Overall, having a tutoring session scheduled decreased a student’s probability of being absent by 0.5 percentage points, and having a tutoring session scheduled during the school day decreased a student’s probability of being absent by 0.8 percentage points. If tutoring is offered at the suggested dosage of three times a week, tutored students would attend an average of 0.5 days more over the course of the school year, with an average of 0.8 days more if tutoring is delivered during the school day. If tutoring was offered every day of a child’s year in school, we would expect them to increase their attendance in school by 0.8 days on average, with an average of 1.3 days if tutoring was scheduled during the school day. This is more evidence that, while alone high-impact tutoring is not a silver bullet for attendance issues, it can be part of the solution.

Importantly, the Initiative has continued to be successful in serving students with lower academic performance and students from historically marginalized groups, who represent the majority of OSSE-funded HIT students. Students with lower state standardized test scores (as measured by Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers or PARCC) in the 2022-23 school year, as well as Black or African American students and Hispanic or Latino students were more likely to receive tutoring in the Initiative’s second year.

Finally, the Initiative has provided access to tutoring in areas of DC with fewer financial resources. As Figure below shows, existing private tutoring is concentrated in wealthier areas of the city while OSSE-funded tutoring is largely on the east side of the city in wards 5, 7, and 8, areas of the city that tend to have fewer financial resources.