This research report presents the results from the second year of a randomized controlled trial of an early elementary reading tutoring program that has been designed to be affordable at scale. During the 2021-22 school year, over eight hundred kindergarten students in a large Southeastern school district were randomly assigned to receive supplementary tutoring with the Chapter One program. The program continued during the 2022-23 school year, while the children attended first grade. The program embeds part-time tutors into the classroom to provide short bursts of instruction to individual students each week over the course of the school year. The consistent presence of the tutors allows them to build strong relationships with students and meet students’ individual needs at the moment they might most benefit from personalized instruction. The program focuses more time on students with the lowest literacy skills.

We find that students who participated in Chapter One’s program increased their early literacy skills on both program-collected and district-collected measures, meaningfully reducing their likelihood of being classified at risk in early literacy. The positive findings at the end of the second year of implementation continue to provide promising evidence of an affordable and sustainable approach for delivering one-on-one personalized literacy tutoring at scale.