The results from the fall 2024 release of “The Nation’s Report Card” (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) confirmed what many who follow schooling outcomes for children already anticipated: post-pandemic reading and math scores still fell short of their pre-pandemic levels for every tested grade level. Even more concerning, students at the lower end of the achievement distribution lost more ground than students at the top of the distribution, exacerbating inequalities that have long persisted along race and class lines.

How could this be, given the historic investment in school funding by the federal government and the focus on instituting evidence-based practices, such as high-dosage tutoring? Research suggests that the investments overall yielded significant learning per $1,000 spent, on average, which is both encouraging and falls short of the magnitude of effects needed for students to recover and thrive academically.

This report summarizes the ongoing work by our research team to understand high-dosage tutoring scaled in the post-pandemic environment — and what its impacts were on student achievement. The insights presented in this report are derived directly from data collected to date through the Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI), a large-scale randomized controlled trial undertaken by the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC. Since the 2021-22 school year, the PLI research team has worked in partnership with eight sites — which include both large and small districts in urban, suburban, and rural areas, an entire state, and a charter network — randomizing more than 27,000 students to date to three different conditions:

• Evidence-based high-dosage tutoring (HDT) models;
   
• New, innovative lower-cost tutoring models that we codesigned with our partner districts, which we called “sustainable” high-dosage tutoring models (SHDT); and
   
• Business as usual.

Over four years, we have randomized students to one of these three conditions at the student, classroom, and sometimes grade level to capture not just whether HDT can scale successfully across the country, but also whether it is possible to lower the cost of delivering successful tutoring (in order to serve as many students as possible) by giving lower-cost SHDT to at least some students, focusing on those whom the data might suggest could still benefit from that type of help.

This report focuses on our findings to date from the 2023-24 school year. In 2023-24, we partnered with eight state, district, and charter education agencies nationwide. We randomized a total of 17,330 students, and 16,435 students are in our analytic sample for 2023-24.

In 2023-24, our PLI partners provided tutoring in math and reading across grades K–12, though were largely focused on early reading and middle grade math. In addition, the majority of our partners had both an HDT and an SHDT type of tutoring provided to their students.

Overall Findings

• Tutoring — both high-dosage tutoring and sustainable high-dosage tutoring — is effective overall. Pooled analyses show the effect of participating in tutoring is statistically significant and ranges from 0.06-0.09 standard deviations (SD), or approximately 1-2 months of additional learning. These overall effects mask considerable variability across sites.
   
• Tutoring impacts seem robust across a variety of models. Lower-cost models ($1,200 per student) are just as effective as higher-cost models ($2,000 per student). Virtual tutoring seems just as effective as in person tutoring in PLI sites.
   
• More tutoring minutes correlate with greater learning gains. But minutes of tutoring provided are much lower than past tutoring studies (corresponding to smaller gains in student learning).