Should tutoring play a big role in America’s schools going forward?

Happy Tuesday everyone. I’m back from Rome and ready to rumble. Let me offer a special thanks to Andy “Eduwonk” Rotherham for declaring my Twitter feed out but SCHOOLED in for 2026! Today we tee up a debate about tutoring and round up lots of great takes from Matt Gandal, Jeanne Allen, Bruno Manno, Marguerite Roza, Rick Hess, Danyela Souza Egorov, Jed Wallace, Tim Daly, Chad Aldeman, and many more.

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I’ve been trying to write something about Liz Cohen’s book, The Future of Tutoring, for at least two months now. Liz is a friend, and she’s produced a very good resource, especially for educators tasked with implementing high-impact tutoring programs in their schools, districts, or charter networks.

Yet I’ve struggled to muster much enthusiasm for the topic. That’s probably because I was convinced by a short paper that Mike Goldstein and Bowen Paulle wrote for Fordham back in the dark days of the pandemic: The narrow path to do it right: Lessons from vaccine making for high-dosage tutoring. These two had more professional experience with high-impact tutoring than just about anyone—and perhaps because of that, they were skeptical that districts could do it well or at scale. They warned:

If you believe tutoring is simple, then the path to scale is easy: Get some cash, use it to pay smart and kind adults to sit across from kids and teach, create some rules, and get to work.

If you think “it’s weird in there”—that it’s quite hard to create a productive tutorial, that the work of well-intentioned adults too often leads to worthless lessons—you’ll grasp that it would be easy to waste a ton of money in this arena.

And waste a ton of money we did, according to recent studies that were released and covered in the media after Liz’s book went to press. As Mike and Bowen had warned, schools struggled with the daunting logistics of tutoring done right: finding, training, and scheduling the tutors; matching the instruction to what students were learning in class; making (and keeping) the initiative a priority among changing district circumstances; and much, much else.

In short: It was too hard.

Liz isn’t naïve about any of this. Though she expresses enthusiasm for tutoring in her book, she includes plenty of qualifications, concerns, and acknowledgements about the challenges that must be overcome on the road to successful implementation. She thinks it’s worth the effort. I’m not so sure.

I should tread carefully here, given that I’m far from an instructional expert. I’m a policy wonk, through and through. But it always struck me as questionable that tutoring was the best way to handle the disastrous aftermath of Covid-era school closures. As I wrote (again and again), the obvious move for charter schools and districts that were shuttered for most of the 2020–21 school year was to press the stop button and have everybody repeat their grade in 2021–22.

Giving students an extra year of instruction, with a chance to master the grade-level material they missed, struck me as much more efficient than moving everyone along to the next grade, where of course they struggled mightily to keep up, and then offer the patch of 90 minutes of tutoring a week to just about everybody.

But that idea was a nonstarter, so here we are. I still think it’s not too late. Plenty of schools—especially Title I elementary schools—have lots of kids who are nowhere near grade level, who could benefit from extra instructional time. Instead of putting all seven-year-olds in second grade just because they are seven, why not put kids in the grade that best matches their current ability level, so that their teachers can move them forward and get them back on track?

That approach would require upsetting longstanding norms—and admitting to parents that their children are not at grade level. And it would only work well in the hands of talented teachers with lots of support, training, and high-quality instructional materials. If I were running a school district or charter network—and let’s be clear, I’m not, nor I am qualified to do so—I would invest serious money in raising teacher salaries in high-poverty schools (akin to D.C.’s IMPACT initiative) and providing educators great support and instructional materials, rather than putting big bucks into tutoring.

Which is not to say that there’s no role for tutoring. Tutoring—or at least small group instruction—has been a part of American education pretty much forever, especially in elementary schools and especially in the context of Title I programs and services for kids with disabilities. That’s fine, and let’s get better at making those efforts as effective as possible.

But should tutoring be a staple of most middle schools and high schools? A centerpiece of district improvement strategies and state policy reforms? I don’t think so. It’s too hard to get right, too focused on fixing instructional problems after they’ve happened, and too little bang for too much buck.

That’s my take. But what do you think? Should the typical American school make tutoring a core part of its instructional strategy, much more so than what was common in the pre-Covid era? And if so, how do we overcome the real implementation challenges that everyone admits exist? Please weigh in by responding to this email or by sending me a note at SCHOOLED [at] fordhaminstitute [dot] org.

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• Building on last week’s SCHOOLED, Matt Gandal remembers Jim Hunt and Lou Gerstner and discusses the need for today’s governors and CEOs to get involved in the push for economic competitiveness via stronger schools. Matt argues, persuasively:

  While there is widespread recognition today that education must be more closely connected to workforce and economic agendas, the mechanisms to realize that vision are weak. Collaboration across state lines exists, but not at anything close to the scale or intensity of the 1990s. The bipartisan spirit that allowed leaders to develop shared solutions while maintaining their own state priorities is largely absent. And yet the need has only grown.

• Jeanne Allen, meanwhile, remembers Rod Paige. She is particularly appreciative of his willingness to speak honestly and in plain language about the pernicious influence of the teachers unions. “Rod Paige knew that because of the unions,” Jeanne writes, “merit gives way to uniformity, excellence is treated as inequity, and teachers themselves are shortchanged while unions grow richer, more political, and further removed from classrooms.”

• Next: “Some School Districts Won the MacKenzie Scott Jackpot. What Happened Next?” It’s a great question—and strange that no reporters asked it. Instead, it was Marguerite Roza, who answers (sadly, predictably): not much. She writes:

  By any measure, it’s been a mixed bag. The lucky districts tend to fall into one of three groups:

  • Best case: About a third of the districts made thoughtful plans and spent their money accordingly. Tacoma, for example, is portioning out the funds over a decade on after-school enrichment and jobs programs for students.

  • Worst case: Another third made plans that were derailed by mismanaged district finances. After dreaming big, each of these districts ended up using remaining grant funds to plug self-inflicted budget holes. In each case, the leader who was responsible for the botched finances is long gone, leaving the community to bicker over the whole experience.

  • Deferred case: In the final third, the money simply got parked for a few years while leaders attended to other pressing issues. Thus far, no one has benefited

• Speaking of great questions, Jim Griffin and Thibaut Delloue ponder “Why Florida Charter Schools Are at Capacity While District Seats Sit Empty.” You know the answer: because districts are dead set against sharing facilities with charters, and Florida’s laws aren’t strong enough to force them to do it anyway. They write:

  Florida’s legislature partially addressed the issue through a measure that allows specially designated, high-performing charter schools to move into district facilities. However, the new law provides virtually no incentives for districts and no process to resolve disputes with charters or among competing charter operators. Districts are pushing back as the law goes into effect.

  Thankfully, there are model policies in other locales that Florida could adopt, including New York City, San Diego, Denver, and especially Indianapolis, Jim and Thibaut explain. Here’s hoping.

• Next up is Bruno Manno, with a double-header. First, Bruno offers several concrete ideas for improving literacy in America, from early childhood to early adulthood. Among them: treating adult literacy as “a workforce policy, not a charitable endeavor.” Then, in a National Affairs long-read that’s worth it, Bruno provides a robust argument that schools and other institutions need to help young people build their “social capital,” including informal networks of peers and mentors that might help them navigate the labor market and find a job. He points to Cristo Rey as one promising model, and wonders whether we might develop indicators to measure high schools’ effectiveness at helping students build these sorts of connections.

• Another long National Affairs article worth your time is Eric Claeys’s essay on civil service reform. He has federal bureaucrats in mind but, IMO, his arguments apply to teachers and other educators, too. Eric writes:

  In a republic, the government is supposed to respect the rights of its citizens, and federal policies are supposed to change as voters cast their ballots for lawmakers, a president, and new initiatives....
  
  Current tenure protections threaten both of these tenets of republican government. Tenure in the civil service ultimately facilitates bureaucratic and administrative governance. At-will employment facilitates republican government and our Madisonian political order.

  If we believe in democratic control of public education—via local school board elections, but also those for governors and state boards of education—it’s a problem if those elected officials can’t effectuate change.

• Here’s one more long read that’s worthy of your attention, this time from the ideological left. Stefan Redding Lallinger wonders, “Is the Fight for School Integration Still Worthwhile for African Americans?” Stefan notes that support for desegregation among Black voters is down dramatically from its high point in the late 1960s, with just a third saying in 2018 “that segregation was either ‘not too serious of a problem’ or ‘not a problem at all.’” In this context, Stefan writes:

  We must then create space in our social discourse for a vision of the future that both promotes integrated schools for Black students and empowers Black students to lean on the scaffolds of uplifting and powerful all-Black spaces, be they outside-of-school institutions, or within-school structures. Just as we see no contradiction in students of different religions worshiping in a mosque, church, and synagogue on the weekend and then returning to learn in the same classroom on Monday, all renewed, affirmed, and better equipped to participate in its messy affairs, there is no conflict here.
  
  There must also be hope that we can create schools that live up to the democratic imperative of education in a multicultural society: places where all students are held to the highest standards, where their educators are imbued with the belief that any child can and should be successful, and all children are part of a culture where people respect, affirm, and learn from and about each other, especially across lines of difference.

• The best school system in America is run by Uncle Sam, claims Tim Daly. Yes, he’s referring to the schools managed here and abroad by the Department of Defense for military families. Whereas the DOD schools were in the middle of the pack on NAEP in 2013, they are now way out front, with a lead of “nearly a grade level” over their closest competitor, Massachusetts. While the schools’ demographics are surely a factor—few service members are truly poor—there are still lessons to be had, Tim argues:

  This is the provocation of the DoDEA story. It represents a path not taken. While facing the same realities as other systems this past decade—rising teen use of social media and screens, adolescent mental health crises, COVID disruptions—its performance did not suffer in the same way.

• Rick Hess is feeling grouchy—this time about the state of education research. On the heels of the release of his annual list of the nation’s most influential academics in education, he writes that federal R & D’s ills are nothing compared to the research enterprise writ large.

  The problem is less with IES than with the state of the field. Given that, there’s only so much that tinkering with the IES machinery can accomplish. Indeed, most criticism of the agency is about balky processes, burdensome applications, and a lack of timeliness. Those are real issues, but downsizing or reorganizing IES won’t address broader concerns about the state of education research. That would require the agency to once again embrace [Russ] Whitehurst’s unflinching commitment to rewriting the field’s standards and norms.

• Chad Aldeman is also feeling grumpy. He’s frustrated that Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin attempted to sign the Commonwealth up for the federal tax credit initiative, even though it appears that the Trump folks won’t let states add any accountability measures for schools or for “scholarship granting organizations.” Chad writes:

  For Youngkin specifically, he has now given his critics another quiver in their arrows. He spent four years working to impose tougher standards on public schools. Then, one of his last acts as governor will be trying to send more money to unaccountable private schools.

• Jed Wallace is also feeling peeved—one might say cheesed off (ba dum ching)—in his case about Vermont. Whereas Mississippi and Louisiana keep surging, the Green Mountain State is engaged in vicious fights over preserving its schools, rather than reforming them. Jed explains:

  For decades, small townships were able to set local tax rates in ways that induced the state to provide additional resources from a pooled, statewide fund. The benefits of higher spending were local and immediate. The costs were diffused across the entire state.
  
  Over time, communities learned how to exploit the system. Then enrollment began to fall. And fall sharply.

• Let’s stick with funding for a moment. In light of the Minnesota Medicaid scandals (which SCHOOLED covered last week), Marguerite Roza offers a helpful tutorial on waste, fraud, and abuse in traditional public schools, positing that fraud is rare but waste is common (and abuse is somewhere in between). She writes:

  Spending crosses the line into waste when leaders continue funding programs year after year despite repeated evidence that they aren’t working—or, as we’re seeing this year, when expenses persist even though they’re no longer needed (for example, because enrollment has declined).
  
  Too often wasteful spending is baked into an outdated budgeting process designed to repeat last year’s allocations, regardless of impact or current need. What’s needed instead is a data-driven budgeting approach, refocused on outcomes.

• Here’s the deep history of the debate over mayoral control of schools in New York City, via Joe Viteritti. It didn’t start with Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein. In fact, it goes all the way back to 1983, when Joe himself started making the case for putting Hizzoner in charge of the Big Apple’s sprawling education system.

  The school board that governed the system was composed of seven members who chose the chancellor—two appointed by the mayor and five by the respective borough presidents. The mayor’s primary role in the system was to come up with about half its budget. His two board appointees could be easily outvoted by the others. Mayor Ed Koch used to complain that Albert Shanker, the president of the teachers union, had more clout on the board than he did.

  Thankfully, newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani has decided to stick with mayoral control for now. Here’s hoping he doesn’t change his mind.

• Granted, what really matters is what Mamdani wants to do with his control over New York’s schools, and so far his plans are a mixed bag. His chosen Chancellor, Kamar Samuels, promises to keep the city’s well-regarded (and so far successful) early reading initiative, but as Ray Domanico argues, he’s also at risk of prioritizing school integration over rigor. Ray writes:

  If Mamdani and Samuels are committed to bringing academic rigor to all the city’s schools, they should make this their sole focus, with a plan to hold schools and staff accountable for student outcomes. They should worry less about engineering the “right” racial mix of students in schools.

• Before we focus entirely on the Mandani era, Danyela Souza Egorov thinks we should pause and reflect on Mayor Eric Adams’s education legacy. He made plenty of mistakes—including keeping schools closed and kids masked for too long in the waning days of the pandemic. But his work on reading was praiseworthy and impactful. Danyela writes:

  In 2023, Adams and Chancellor David Banks launched NYC Reads, requiring all districts to adopt one of three curricula grounded in cognitive science and linguistic research, known as the science of reading. The initiative also provides coaching and professional development to help teachers successfully implement the new curriculum....
  
  Early signs are positive: reading proficiency rates rose by 7.2 percent after implementation. Education advocates hope the momentum continues. Tim Castanza, founder of Bridge Prep, urged future administrations to “commit to high-quality teacher training and development,” while Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute warned that real results will take sustained effort: “NYC Reads is a long game.”

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• Boston University philosophy professor Victor Kumar muses on saving student essays in the age of AI. His solution for now? In-class essay exams paired with low-stakes assignments that help students prepare. Kumar’s solution might also work in high school classrooms, but teachers should pay attention to his larger message: Give new strategies time to “cook,” and don’t be afraid to refine along the way. —Open Questions (Substack)

• A new Brookings Institution study finds that the pandemic had a particularly negative impact on older students—those now in middle school and high school. —Daniel Mollenkamp, EdSurge

• “The Supreme Court deadlocked on religious charter schools. Round 2 is on the horizon.” —Erica Meltzer, Chalkbeat

• Classical schools are on the rise, especially in the South. James Traub observes a sixth-grade English class at Founders Classical Academy of Lewisville, Texas, where students recite Shakespeare and give oral presentations on The Count of Monte Cristo. “Sixth-graders elsewhere do not read novels,” he writes, and “high-school students are not asked to elevate their gaze to the beautiful and the true.” —The Wall Street Journal

• “Most Tennessee public school students who use education savings account vouchers aren’t leaving low-performing public schools, while ESA students overall are underperforming their public school peers in both academic achievement and growth.” —Melissa Brown, Chalkbeat

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