.....Scheduling tutoring time during normal school hours and finding classroom space to conduct it are huge challenges for school leaders. The schedule is already packed with other classes and there aren’t enough empty classrooms. The easiest option is to tack tutoring on to the end of the school day as an after-school program.

New Mexico did just that and offered high school students free 45-minute online video sessions three times a week in the evenings and weekends. The tutors were from Saga Education, the same tutoring organization that had produced spectacular results in Chicago. Only about 500 students signed up out of more than 34,000 who were eligible, according to a June 2023 report from MDRC, an outside research organization. Researchers concluded that after-school tutoring wasn’t a “viable solution for making a sizable and lasting impact.” The state has since switched to scheduling tutoring during the school day.....

.....Researchers at MDRC in a December 2023 report wrote about different hiring strategies that schools around the country are using. I was flabbergasted to read that New Mexico was paying online tutors $50 an hour to tutor from their homes. Hourly rates of $20 to $30 are fairly common in my reporting. But at least the state was able to offer tutoring to students in remote, rural areas where it would otherwise be impossible to find qualified tutors.....

.....Chicago took the burden off schools and hired the tutors from the central office. But schools preferred tutors who were from the neighborhood because they could potentially become future teachers. The MDRC report described a sort of catch-22. Schools don’t have the capacity to hire and train tutors, but the tutors that are sent to them from outside vendors or a central office aren’t ideal either.....

.....The good news is that students who worked with trained tutors made the same gains in reading as those who were given extra reading help by teachers. But the reading gains for students were inconsistent. Some students progressed less in reading than students typically do in a year without tutoring. Others gained almost an additional year’s worth of reading instruction – 88 percent more.....

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