Kevin Huffman understood early on that the pandemic would have a devastating impact on American students — and that some would be hurt far more than others. In March 2020, as schools were shuttered and classrooms went virtual, the former Tennessee education commissioner wrote a prescient op-ed for the Washington Post. “Years of research shows that online schooling is ineffective — and that students suffer significant learning losses when they have a long break from school,” Huffman wrote. “Now they’re getting both, in a hastily arranged mess… Results will range from lackluster to catastrophic, with the largest burden falling on the poorest kids.”
Huffman, then a partner at the education nonprofit City Fund, turned out to be right, of course. Nearly three years later, we know that the pandemic resulted in significant academic setbacks for American students. We also know that learning loss was most severe for students from low-income communities and communities of color, and that those who were already lagging academically fell the furthest behind.
Huffman and Accelerate, the organization he now heads, are part of a unique effort to determine how to scale targeted, high-intensity tutoring (also called “high-dosage” tutoring) to mitigate COVID-related learning loss. The ambitious, multiyear research project, which will be conducted by the University of Chicago Education Lab, was launched with $18 million in funding from American Achieves, Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of the hedge fund Citadel, and Arnold Ventures. The Education Lab will work with research nonprofit MRDC as well as Accelerate to partner with school districts around the country, including Chicago Public Schools. Tens of thousands of students will be included in the randomized control trial.
Monica Bhatt, the Education Lab’s senior research director, hopes this project will address disparities in achievement that existed long before the pandemic. “As students continue to struggle with pandemic-era learning loss, this project represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to boost learning and close longstanding gaps in student achievement,” she said when the initiative was announced.
An effective intervention
What is high-dosage tutoring, and how effective is it? Defined as at least 30 minutes of intensive, individual instruction conducted three or more days a week, high-dosage tutoring is a simple intervention that packs a big punch. A research overview by the Annenberg Institute’s National Student Support Accelerator calls it “one of the most effective academic interventions, with evidence of greater impact than class-size reduction or technology support.” The overview deemed tutoring “one of the most impactful educational approaches” for students from lower-income families.
Previous research at the University of Chicago’s Education Lab helped demonstrate the effectiveness of high-intensity tutoring. Both Bhatt and Roseanna Ander, the executive director of the Education Lab, were so excited by these findings that they couldn’t wait to share them with school district leaders. “Our research showed that this type of tutoring is one of the most effective interventions in education that we’ve ever studied,” Ander said. “But when we went to school districts to talk to them about it, they said, ‘That’s really exciting. And also, it’s cost-prohibitive.’”
The research project’s goal is to see if and how economic barriers to broad implementation of high-dosage tutoring can be overcome without compromising effectiveness.
“We want to understand how we can reduce that cost so that more students can be served,” Bhatt said. “And we want to figure out what tutoring model works best for which kids, instead of thinking about high-dosage tutoring as one narrow approach. There are a variety of different models of tutoring — some are less intensive, some are more intensive. If we can figure out which works better for which kids, we can share that information back with school districts so they can better prioritize their resources.”
The goal is to reach as many kids as possible, according to Huffman. “Lots of people are engaged in tutoring across the country, using programs that work at a smaller scale,” he said. “But we have a problem right now in this country: Millions of kids are behind. So we have a scale challenge.”
The research project is a five-year initiative, but Ander emphasizes that the Education Lab will be releasing findings along the way. “We’re not telling people, ‘Just wait until we’re done with the five years of the study and then we’ll tell you what the results are,’” she said. “This is meant to be research that’s very practical — very rigorous, but also very practical — so school districts can learn which of these efforts are moving the needle and invest in approaches that are doing the most good, even during the course of the study.” The Education Lab will also be offering districts hands-on technical assistance to help schools with practical issues like implementation and scheduling.
“Up the evidence escalator”
Arnold Ventures, the hybrid funding vehicle founded by Laura and John Arnold, is a major force behind high-dosage tutoring. Not only is Arnold providing funding for the current project — it also helped launch Accelerate, Huffman’s organization, earlier this year. Accelerate’s goal is to make high-dosage tutoring available to students across the country, and it was incubated at America Achieves, a nonprofit that seeds initiatives that impact underserved communities. Accelerate will spin off as a separate nonprofit early next year. Ken Griffin, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Overdeck Family Foundation also provided funding for Accelerate’s initial launch.
Arnold Ventures stands out among funders for its support for this type of in-depth, methodical research. The scope of Arnold Ventures’ work is broad, and includes criminal justice, health, contraceptive choice and access, and higher education (see IP’s recent report on the foundation’s higher ed strategy). Overall, it seeks to “invest in evidence-based solutions that maximize opportunity and minimize injustice.”
Arnold Ventures supports K-12 education primarily through the City Fund, which it helped create in 2018. But according to Amanda Moderson-Kox, Arnold Ventures’ director of evidence-based policy, high-dosage tutoring shows so much promise that the funder decided to back it, even though it doesn’t fit neatly into Arnold’s existing portfolios.
Moderson-Kox’s team identifies and supports rigorous, randomized control trials of programs that already have some evidence behind them. “Our role is to move things up the evidence escalator, you might say; we’re in the middle and trying to move things toward the top,” she said. “High-dosage tutoring is an area that fits quite well with this idea of funding rigorous evaluation of approaches that already have some prior evidence. We already have some good evidence that there are lots of different high-dosage tutoring models that can be effective.”
Moderson-Kox also cautioned that evidence-building can take time. “We are playing the long game here. Of course, when crises arrive and there are problems, philanthropy wants to jump in right away. It’s important for funders to do that, but I think of what we’re doing as a complement: giving people more interventions and practices [for which] they know the research has been done to establish that this approach has credible evidence behind it.”
Meanwhile, Ken Griffin, another funder of the high-dosage tutoring research project, is a longtime supporter of the University of Chicago and other projects in his former hometown, as IP has reported. High-intensity tutoring and post-pandemic academic recovery are clearly among the hedge fund billionaire’s priorities: He was an early funder of Accelerate, and joined the Gates Foundation in 2020 to support the expansion of a large-scale tutoring program in Chicago and New York schools.
Closing the achievement gap
Although it’s true that research doesn’t happen overnight, everyone involved in the high-dosage tutoring project knows they face a deadline: federal COVID relief dollars that school districts can use to support pandemic-related issues, including learning loss, will run out over the next two years.
That’s why Huffman says it’s important for philanthropy to get involved now. “Funders naturally ask what their role is, given the relief funding that is pouring into school districts now,” he said. “I think for that very reason, philanthropy can play an important role by supporting innovation and research and evaluation to understand what works and what doesn’t, and why. Then we will be better equipped to make the case for things that will help kids catch up over the long haul. Because we know that two years from now, when the federal relief money runs out, kids are still going to be behind.” (Recent research makes the case that the government relief funding, while welcome, won’t be adequate to address students’ COVID-related learning deficits.)
Huffman believes that high-dosage tutoring will not only ease learning loss caused by the pandemic, but also help close the yawning achievement gap that existed long before. “The pandemic exacerbated gaps that were already there. And even if we were able to catch kids up to pre-pandemic levels, there would still be major gaps largely along the lines of race and class. So even going back to the way things were before is not good enough, and right now, we’re not even on track to do that.”
Huffman considers it a moral obligation to address this achievement gap, and the Education Lab’s Roseanna Ander agrees. “We do think [high-dosage tutoring] is one of the most important ways to close that gap and level the playing field,” she said. “You know, people talk about equity of opportunity all the time. This is a really important, big push to make good on that aspiration so we don’t see these gaps continue to widen. It has long-term implications for life outcomes of every kind.”