Over the last 18 months, the pandemic has exacerbated achievement gaps for students who were already falling behind before COVID-19 arrived. What happens now is critical for ensuring that schools don’t go back to business as usual, but instead create a system for educational recovery that serves every student.

One initiative to embrace is tutoring that is accessible and available to all. Here’s what’s happening in our public charter school in Newark — and why it can serve as a model across New Jersey and beyond.

At Great Oaks Legacy Charter School, we’ve seen firsthand the positive impacts that one-on-one or small-group learning can have on students. Our method is often called high-dosage tutoring, but it isn’t just about the number of hours. It’s also about the relationship between student and tutor.

One of our core guiding principles is building genuine relationships within our school community and ensuring that students feel known, valued, and loved. Tutors work with students daily, either independently or in small groups, and contact their families each week to share progress. Building trust in this way is imperative and helps to generate the type of academic gains we are striving toward.

Since before the pandemic, Great Oaks has worked in partnership with AmeriCorps. Our program, the Great Oaks Tutor Corps, is a one-year AmeriCorps fellowship for recent college graduates who serve in Newark and provide every student in grades 3 to 10 with two hours of tutoring in English language arts and math every school day. Over the years, Great Oaks Legacy Charter School students have consistently achieved a high level of academic growth, and we attribute much of that to our daily tutoring model.

The results have been astounding: High-dosage tutoring has helped Great Oaks regularly send 80 to 90 percent of graduates to college. Research shows that tutoring programs like ours increase achievement by roughly an additional three to 15 month of learning across grade levels. High-dosage tutoring is also one of the most effective ways to increase achievement for students from lower-income families. This is the kind of innovative program that other schools can implement in order to ensure that they are helping all of their students succeed, especially after the COVID pandemic.

Read the full article about the successful tutoring model by Jared Taillefer at The 74.