'High-dosage' tutoring is getting students back up to speed, schools say. But its future is uncertain
Intensive tutoring — a key weapon in the battle against pandemic-era learning delays — appears to be paying off in some North Carolina schools, early data shows.
North Carolina leaders are measuring the impact of intensive tutoring on helping students catch up after falling behind during the learn-from-home days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But as schools look to overcome that challenge, they're contending with another: Much of the money that pays for the tutoring is about to dry up.
Since 2021, North Carolina schools have started or expanded "high-dosage" tutoring programs — 30-minute sessions with one to three students a few times per week. They’re designed to push struggling students up to grade level. It's data-driven, personalized for students and done during the school day.
"We're pretty clear on the big picture about what makes tutoring work, and it is focused on intensive, relationship-based, individualized instruction," said Kathy Bendheim, managing director of the National Student Support Accelerator. After-school tutoring has spotty attendance records, she said, and on-call, web-based tutoring may not be tailored to the student or used very frequently, either.
During the 2021-22 school year at least 9,000 students received tutoring. The bulk of them received instruction from North Carolina Education Corps tutors, while about 1,000 worked with Wake County schools tutors. More students worked with other tutoring programs in other school systems. As a result, many students are moving closer to grade-level expectations than students who didn’t receive the tutoring, data shows.
Educators generally agree that personnel-intensive programs need to be reaching more students. The challenge is how to get there.
North Carolina Education Corps Executive Director John-Paul Smith said his organization is already talking with school systems about transitioning to more permanent funding sources and said some have already begun making changes.
“Next year is going to be a big learning year for us in terms of how large is that appetite,” Smith said. “I think that's why the data is so key. We have to be able to answer that question: Is the juice worth the squeeze?”
‘How we can close achievement gaps’
Educators say the programs are showing promising results, though they plan to keep studying their effectiveness.
Discerning the impact of intensive tutoring isn't a perfect science. Schools are trying multiple types of interventions for students across their schools, as all students suffered some learning delays during pandemic-prompted remote learning. On top of that, some schools are further along in adopting statewide changes to reading instruction that are designed to better align with research.
"Part of our success in Orange County Schools is this understanding that high-impact tutoring isn't stand-alone," said Mariah Morris, director of literacy intervention at Orange County Schools. "It is part of a larger system that wraps around the child and that system I'm really passionate about. It does not only touch academics, it also touches the social-emotional capacity of what it feels like to be a child who is not able to keep up with their peers in reading or math."
Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools students who were tutored by North Carolina Education Corps tutors — all in kindergarten through third grade — had bigger gains on their reading assessments than the average North Carolina kindergarten-through-third-grade student, according to a November report from the corps.
At the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, just 1% of kindergartners in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County tutoring program were meeting grade-level expectations. By the end of the school year, about 58% were hitting grade-level benchmarks. First-graders, second-graders and third-graders also showed significant improvement after going through tutoring.
Statewide, smaller percentages of students reached grade-level expectations after intensive tutoring.
Wake County compiled numbers on one reading subscore for second-through-fifth-grade students — the number of words they read correctly. About 1,000 Wake students received tutoring from volunteers with a program called Helping Early Literacy with Practice Strategies (HELPS).
A quarter of delayed students reached grade-level benchmarks after receiving the tutoring.
Districtwide, about 8% of all students who were below grade-level expectations at the start of the school year had met expectations by the end of the year. That figure includes all students who did or didn’t receive tutoring; most students who are below grade-level in Wake County and beyond aren’t able to receive high-dosage tutoring because of the programs’ limited capacities.
The goal of the tutoring is typically to get the student onto grade-level, so those who haven’t met grade-level yet may still be receiving the tutoring.
Black and Hispanic students made some of the biggest gains.
"This is how we can close achievement gaps," Michele Woodson, Wake’s assistant superintendent of student support, told the Wake County school board at a student achievement committee meeting earlier this month.
Board Member Cheryl Caulfield said she's volunteered in classrooms and seen the kids who get the tutoring have "a-ha" moments and go from struggling to read to being excited to read.
"I hope that we continue to put [the tutoring] in as many classrooms as we can," Caulfield said.
'The question of the hour'
Much of the funding for the tutoring comes from one-time federal stimulus that must be spent by Sept. 30. School systems are now planning for how they'll keep the tutoring afloat without the federal funding.
"That's the question of the hour," Morris said.
Experts widely acknowledge that students, as a whole, are still not testing at the levels they did before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020.
"It's very clear that we're years from students being where they would have been," Bendheim said.
Orange County Schools has a team dedicated to figuring out how to use other funding sources to keep the tutoring alive, Morris said. The school system believes in the success of the program, reducing the number of students at-risk for reading retention by about 50%. It's even among the four school systems piloting similar tutoring for math with the Education Corps.
Legally, other federal, state or even local funds could be used to sustain the tutoring programs. But those dollars are already being used on other things. So school systems could be faced with making the decision to cut programming in one area to support tutoring. And seeking additional government money could prove challenging, especially if funding must be approved by political bodies with competing priorities.
Not all of the money will run out.
Donations have helped support the Education Corps and other tutoring programs, such as Wake's HELPS program. HELPS tutors are volunteers, meaning the district won’t face the same challenges as the Education Corps in keeping the program running or expanding it.
The North Carolina General Assembly has also set aside $3 million in state funding to continue the Education Corps during the 2024-25 school year, after the stimulus dollars dry up.
The corps' budget for this year is more than twice that amount, but that also partly comes from private donations, according to Smith, the corps executive director.
But the group’s program requires a local match from school systems to fund tutor wages, many of which are paid using federal stimulus dollars. Money from the organization is used to train and advise tutors, recruit tutors and conduct other administrative duties.
The corps provides about $550 per student, while local school systems pay about $650 per student.
Smith said he's hoping to find a way to bring the overall cost per student down to less than $1,000 on average.
The corps has expanded each year since starting in 2021, adding tutors to serve more students. It plans to continue growing, requiring additional strategic maneuvering as funding shifts. Some schools are showing commitment to the program in creative ways.
'Win-win all the way around'
Some schools have made high-dosage tutoring part of their existing support systems for students. Called "multi-tiered systems of support," schools often move students to different tiers of needs based on classroom struggles. Some are adopting tutoring as one of the ways to meet those students' needs, instead of other methods that may have been used in the past.
Orange County Schools is doing some of that, Morris said.
In elementary schools, teaching assistants can also train and provide high-dosage tutoring to students, if they have the capacity to take that on, Bendheim said.
North Carolina schools have thousands fewer teaching assistants than they did a decade ago, following state budget cuts.
Higher education institutions are also getting creative, Bendheim said.
North Carolina A&T State University, for example, has trained after-school workers at its lab school, Aggie Academy, to provide high-dosage tutoring for the students. The free after-school program has a near-perfect attendance rate, dodging the main shortcoming of other after-school programs.
Using federal pandemic funds, it has paid graduate students in math and science to provide high-dosage tutoring to Math 1 students in Guilford County Schools.
Logistical challenges have paused the program this school year, but it has yielded positive results so far, according to Paula Groves Price, dean of the university’s education school.
The positive results aren’t just limited to academics, she said. Graduate students enjoy the tutoring and are asking how they can become teachers someday.
That’s promising amid higher teacher vacancies, Groves Price said.
“It was just a great win-win all the way around,” she said.
She wants to see how the university can leverage tutoring to increase the number of people who want to become teachers.
Experts talk about intensive tutoring as an opportunity, in addition to being an academic priority, that needs to outlive the brief federal financial window of Covid-19 learning recovery.
"We have this amazing opportunity right now where so many districts and states across the nation have tried it and have seen that it works," Bendheim said. "And so our hope is that people will make sure that they find ways to build it into their schooling for the long run."
