This commentary originally appeared in District Administration.

Recently, the White House announced that it had exceeded its goal of recruiting 250,000 adults to become tutors, mentors, and student success coaches in schools, allowing for a significant expansion of school-based tutoring programs. This is an impressive achievement. The question now is: Can tutoring for more students actually help reverse the pandemic-induced trends of lagging academic progress and widening equity gaps?

While the type of intensive or “high-dosage” tutoring made possible by this expanded workforce has been shown to have powerful positive effects on academic performance, the success of a new tutoring initiative hinges on its implementation. Indeed, some early proponents of tutoring as a post-pandemic silver bullet have recently tempered their expectations, in part because of implementation challenges at a large scale.

Implementing any kind of major intervention in schools at a rapid pace is notoriously hard — a fact we know firsthand as former educators and education researchers at MDRC.

Based on our experience helping schools adopt new practices, we recommend that school leaders commit to the following four strategies to maximize their chances of helping new or expanded tutoring programs take root.

Plan for Absenteeism

While many factors can interfere with students’ access to a new program at school, absenteeism is one of the biggest concerns. In the Personalized Learning Initiative, our evaluation of high-dosage tutoring in eight sites around the country conducted with the University of Chicago Education Lab, tutors have cited student absenteeism from school as a leading reason for students missing their tutoring sessions.

Given the national challenge of chronic absenteeism, schools must account for this issue when implementing a new intervention, either by incorporating strategies to reduce absenteeism into the program or by planning for mitigation strategies when attendance challenges inevitably emerge.

Be Strategic About Scheduling

Adapting school schedules to accommodate a new tutoring program is often an obstacle to change. Ideally, tutoring should not cut into core instructional time, lunch, physical education, or special activities that students often enjoy, such as recess or enrichment.

Alternative solutions include designating tutoring sessions as a class in assigned students’ schedules — a strategy used by high schools in a study where math tutoring had positive impacts — or scheduling tutoring during a period set aside for intervention. School leaders should also consider appointing coordinators to provide ongoing scheduling support throughout the year, a strategy used by Reading Partners, a tutoring program for which an MDRC study found positive effects.

Build Commitment Among All Staff Members

As we showed in our work, it’s important that all staff members — not just those who supervise or administer a new tutoring initiative — understand and support the program’s goals. When school leaders and teachers don’t fully understand a program’s requirements and potential, it’s easy for other school priorities to take precedence and for tutoring sessions to be cancelled.

To get everyone on board with a new or expanded tutoring program, school leaders should widely communicate how the program will benefit students and different staff members. It may also be helpful to involve all staff members from the start in meetings to prepare for launching the program.

Once the program is running, leaders can share program data with everyone to celebrate successes and to identify areas for improvement.

Align the New with the Old

School leaders can support the transition to a new or expanded tutoring program by aligning it with systems already in place. Aligning new initiatives with an organization’s existing structural elements and with staff members’ goals has long been a tenet of strong implementation of evidence-based interventions.

What alignment looks like will vary widely depending on the school. Still, leaders can start by examining procedures used by existing tutoring or academic interventions at the school: How are students identified to participate in those programs? How is students’ progress monitored? It’s possible that the new tutoring program can be integrated into preexisting processes and structures.

Just as seedlings require the proper environmental conditions to grow, new school programs require the right conditions to thrive. While the abovementioned strategies are not always easy to execute and require time and money, committing to these strategies will give new high-dosage tutoring initiatives the best shot at realizing their potential.