During the two years that COVID-19 has upended school for millions of families, education leaders have increasingly touted one tool as a means of compensating for lost learning: personalized tutors. As a growing number of state and federal authorities pledge to make high-quality tutoring available to struggling students, a new study demonstrates positive, if modest, results from an experimental pilot that launched last spring.

The program’s effects suggest that more exposure to supplemental instruction could yield still greater benefits. But design limitations, particularly those stemming from a pronounced shortage of qualified tutor candidates, also raise the question of whether it can be offered on the scale that some advocates envision.

The paper was released only days after U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona declared, in a speech laying out his department’s priorities for the coming year, that every student who has lost ground during the pandemic should receive 90 minutes of tutoring each week. A number of states and large districts have already established tutoring initiatives over the last year, typically underwritten by emergency relief funds from Washington.

That push has been backed by a flood of research indicating that high-quality, high-dosage tutoring can help children realize almost unheard-of learning progress. The bulk of that literature — reviewed in a 2020 meta-analysis of nearly 100 randomized controlled trials — focused on instruction that was delivered in-person, though several COVID-era papers from Europe have also shown significant academic gains resulting from online tutoring.

Both the study’s potential and its constraints are notable at a moment when states and districts are laboring mightily to establish their own tutoring interventions. High-profile efforts in Chicago, Dallas, and Colorado have mobilized millions of dollars in public and philanthropic money in the hopes of reaching thousands of kids who lost ground during months of school closures. A recent analysis from data tracker Burbio showed that roughly one-third of districts planned to spend relief funds on tutoring.

Read the full article about scaling tutoring programs by Kevin Mahnken at The 74.