As schools head into the final quarter, exhausted teachers and administrators are completing their third consecutive year disrupted by the pandemic. Assessments and other year-end data will provide a more complete accounting of the state of American education, but the evidence to date is disturbing.

In aggregate, students are struggling with their early reading, with their math, with their attendance, their behavior and with their mental health. We, collectively, have been through a lot, but schools and young people have borne perhaps the heaviest national burdens. In particular, lower-income and Black and Latino students — those who missed the most in-person instruction and live in communities hit hardest by COVID — lost the most academic ground, exacerbating pre-existing achievement gaps.

We believe this is a critical moment for schools and students. One of us ran the third-largest school district in the country and the other ran a state education agency, and each of us feels drawn to these key questions: How can all of us working in education help ensure that schools have the right strategies and tools to close the massive learning gaps that have widened over the last two years? How can we help students access the support and ongoing relationships they need to thrive? And, knowing that the current gaps will not close overnight, how can we help ensure that high-impact work continues after federal stimulus funding goes away?

These questions led us to the epicenter of pandemic academic recovery: nationwide efforts to implement high-impact tutoring.

Many districts, seeking help for struggling students, have turned to tutoring as a possible intervention, pouring a large sum of federal stimulus dollars into this work. According to a state-by-state breakdown from FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, school systems are on track to spend as much as $3.6 billion over the next two years on tutoring.

This is not surprising. Effective tutoring is one of the few educational interventions with a strong research base. The best approach meets particular design principles: student groups of four or fewer, meeting multiple times a week, with a trained and consistent tutor and high-quality curriculum. Implemented effectively, high-impact tutoring helps students gain ground academically, improves attendance and connects students with an additional trusted adult for support.

Read the full article about nationwide tutoring programs by Kevin Huffman and Janice Jackson at The 74.