During the early years of the pandemic recovery, small group tutoring emerged as a promising strategy to help students make dramatic gains in a short period of time.
But with the expiration of federal relief funding, schools are faced with a different set of challenges now. They have less money available for new initiatives, and they must use evidence to convince policymakers to sustain the most promising efforts and use smart contracting practices to maximize their investments.
In this new environment, I reached out to Jessica Sobin, the High-Impact Tutoring Director for the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), to learn more about the D.C. program and how they’re making their case. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Chad Aldeman: In broad contours, what is D.C.’s tutoring program, and how does it work?
Jessica Sobin: The D.C. High-Impact Tutoring Program has evolved over time. At the beginning, it was initially a response to the COVID-19 pandemic learning disruptions. The mayor made an historic $32 million investment, and the goal was to reach 10% of students, which is about 10,000 students, over the course of three years. We focused on students who were economically disadvantaged, because we anticipated that we would see the greatest impacts among those students on their learning outcomes. That ended up coming to fruition.
Initially, the idea was to “flood the zone” to meet students where they were, whether they were at school or at community-based sites, to offer programs that met evidence-based standards to ensure we could see the outcomes that the research told us could be achieved with high-impact tutoring. We made sure that students received tutoring multiple times per week, and that the students had a consistent tutor in group sizes of four or less.
We took that approach because schools told us that they were overloaded with lots of different needs and had limited capacity to launch new programs. So we started by funding tutoring providers.
Once most of the recovery funds sunset, the mayor allocated almost $5 million from our local budget for this current school year. We took a different approach with that money. We recognized that our path to sustaining the program was to fund local education agencies (the equivalent to independent charter schools or school districts for those in other states) and allowed them to make a choice whether they wanted to partner with a tutoring provider or run staff-led programs. This year, we have 16 local education agency grantees that were awarded funding to launch, expand, or to improve upon existing high-impact tutoring programs. And our goal this year was to reach 6,000 kids through those programs.
Aldeman: What are your ultimate goals and objectives, and how do you evaluate those?
Sobin: We have very clear goals in terms of the number of students we reach and our target student population is students who are furthest from opportunity. We drive towards those goals, and the way we measure success is through collecting data from our tutoring providers and our schools and analyzing it on a regular basis.
One somewhat unique element of our program is that we have been focused on data collection from the very start. We issued a grant to a research partner, the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA), now out of Stanford University, and they conducted an evaluation of our program. For that work, we collected not only student enrollment data, but also student attendance data in our tutoring sessions. So we’ve been able to track how many kids we’re reaching, how much tutoring those kids are getting, and, when we match them with their statewide assessment data that we have access to see how high-impact tutoring is affecting their outcomes.
Aldeman: What can you tell us about the reach, dosage and impact data?
Sobin: We are excited about the number of students that we’ve been able to reach with our programs. In our first the first three years, we surpassed our goal of reaching 10% of students. If we look across the three years we reached 12,500 unique students, and so our reach goals were accomplished.
When we look at our target students, we know that 70% of students who receive high-impact tutoring are economically disadvantaged, as compared to 51% of students in the District overall.
We also are really proud of where we’re offering these services. If you were to go into Google Maps and look for private tutoring services in the District, you’d see a lot of dots come up across our more higher-resourced communities. If you look at a map of where OSSE offers tutoring programs, we’re filling in the gaps where high-quality tutoring services didn’t previously exist.
Aldeman: And what can you say about student results?
Sobin: Our research partners at NSSA demonstrated that high-impact tutoring improves attendance for DC students. It has a causal effect on attendance. Students are more likely to show up in school on days that they have tutoring sessions scheduled.
We don’t have any causal data to show the effects directly on academics, but we are seeing early positive signs that it could be playing a role in helping students accelerate their learning. Over time, we’re seeing that students receiving our tutoring supports narrow the gap in achievement between themselves and their non-tutored peers.
Anecdotally, we also hear from schools that they’re seeing a change in student confidence and student performance.
Aldeman: What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced, and how have you dealt with them?
Sobin: Early on, we had workforce challenges around tutor recruitment and retention, especially as we were emerging from the pandemic. That’s partly why we took an approach of funding a wide variety of different program types. We funded tutoring programs out of universities that leveraged college students, we funded programs that leveraged teachers already in a school, and we funded programs that used community members. Those personnel challenges seemed to dissipate over time, especially after we invited the programs to join our D.C. hiring fairs.
But the biggest challenge with high-impact tutoring is coordination. There are many different adults that that are important in a child’s education, from parents and caregivers to teachers, school leaders, and the tutors themselves. If all of those players can work together the potential is huge, but getting all of those actors to collaborate well and fill student learning gaps can be particularly challenging. That’s really hard work, and it takes time to build those partnerships.
That’s why I’m really excited about next year. We know that schools and families and teachers and tutoring providers have all been building these muscles of how to work together and be on the same page about delivering high-impact tutoring.
Aldeman: One issue with other tutoring programs has been getting students to show up. Did you experience that in D.C.?
Sobin: We hear this time and again from our providers and from our schools that attendance issues can thwart the potential that tutoring programs have for students. If you have a really strong tutoring program, the research from D.C. says that it can improve attendance for students. And the research says programs that are embedded in the school day tend to impact attendance more than after-school programs. Programs that have lower ratios also impact attendance to a greater extent.
But when it comes to the sessions themselves, we know that dosage is important to maximize the benefits of tutoring. If students don’t come to sessions, they’re just not going to learn as much. That’s intuitive.
But we did a few things in D.C. to try to make sure that the programs maximize their potential. That’s one of the reasons we stopped funding programs that were in community-based sites, because the average attendance in those programs was much lower, so we only now fund programs that are in schools. Additionally, we saw that attendance rates were lower for after-school programs than for in-school programs, so we incentivized through our grant application programs that ran during the school day. So we’re trying to shift the models to meet students where they’re most likely to be, which is in school.
Aldeman: Are there any other things that you did on the contracting side to ensure success?
Sobin: When we funded tutoring providers through grants in the first three years, we did not have a requirement around attendance, although we monitored it, and we would have regular check-in conversations where we talked about challenges that tutoring providers were facing. What many of them told us is that they needed to be able to provide food. They needed to be able to give kids incentives to come, but those are complicated when the funding comes through federal dollars.
So in our programs this year, we made it clear that incentives are allowed and encouraged, and we hear from our providers that those make a difference in getting kids to show up and focus during sessions.
Additionally, we now only pay tutoring providers for hours of service that they render to students. We collect data on a monthly basis, and we require that programs maintain an average of 80% attendance rates.
Another way in which we hoped attendance might be improved is that we added a requirement for family engagement for our tutoring providers. That can be challenging, but we think it’s really important that families know that they are participating in high-impact tutoring and they understand the importance of sending kids to school, in general, and especially on days that they have high-impact tutoring sessions.
Aldeman: You’ve dropped some breadcrumbs already, so let’s talk about the future. We’re speaking in mid-April 2025, and there’s a lot of budget uncertainty. But can you tell us what you’re hoping for the program going forward?
Sobin: There is a ton of uncertainty in terms of funding, but we are excited about one definitive source we know of next year, which is a grant award that the District received from Accelerate. We were one of three states to win a $1 million award to continue high-impact tutoring in the District, with a focus on schools in comprehensive support and improvement status.
Additionally, I’m feeling optimistic about the continuation of high-impact tutoring programs in general, regardless of what happens with funding. And that’s because we recently had a convening of different high-impact tutoring stakeholders here in the District. And we heard from lots of different local education agencies who were talking about the incredible outcomes they were seeing among students who are participating in high-impact tutoring and their commitments to figuring out how to leverage their budgets to ensure those programs were sustained.
The other thing that my team is focused on is figuring out how to ensure our tutoring programs in the District are both impactful and as cost-effective as possible. In our first three years of programming, the cost per student came in anywhere between $1,000 to $3,000, depending on the program. This year, we funded programs at about $1,000 per student, while we’ve only seen improvements in the quality of programs.
Aldeman: Why were you able to keep it at that $1,000 level? What were you or the programs doing differently?
Sobin: Well, funding LEAs directly helped. We’ve seen that models led by school-based staff were less expensive than third-party vendors. And so we think we can continue reaching a significant number of students. I think there’s also an incentive now to find cost savings, and schools have been really creative in how they’re braiding funding sources together and then finding efficiencies where they can.
