In April, the U.S. Education Department announced over $220 million of funding — $160 million in federal grants from the American Rescue Plan, along with additional funding from philanthropic sources — to help districts build evidence-based tutoring and enrichment programs to assist with academic recovery. This is in addition to the $122 billion in rescue plan funding, passed in March 2021, which was already allocated for school support over three years.
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The national report card results “show the historic disruption in schooling the president has been sounding the alarm on,” said Maureen Tracey-Mooney, special assistant to the president for education policy. The American Rescue Plan funding, she said, is a multiyear response to that. Research out of Georgetown University suggests that many districts are already spending some of the $122 billion on tutoring.
The biggest challenge to implementing these programs, of course, is cost. In-person tutoring is expensive, requiring close coordination with the classroom and a large supply of tutors. But advocates argue that it’s worth the effort.
Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University and a co-author of a paper on how to build a national tutoring program, said that, in more than a decade of research, he has yet to see a body of evidence “as broad and compelling as the evidence for high cost, intensive long-term tutoring” in public schools. He estimates the cost of universal K-12 public school tutoring at about $50 billion a year.
Still, while the current rescue plan funding is not enough to support every public school student experiencing learning loss — “and that’s a hard truth to swallow,” Dr. Kraft said — the initiative presents a real opportunity to help students.
As long as it’s done right.
Alan Safran, chief executive and co-founder of Saga Education, which has provided tutoring guidance to the Education Department and is Ms. Mitchell’s employer, explained that high-impact tutoring “has to be built into the school day, not as an after-school afterthought.” In addition, students need to meet consistently with the same trained tutor, in groups of two or three, two to three times a week.
