Tutoring Works! Lessons & Insights From Local Programs & Practitioners

This session picked up on our series and our continued focus on tutoring as a critically important “Big Bets” strategy that is making a measurable impact on students learning recovery and acceleration. This week, we were pleased to continue that exploration in a book talk with Liz Cohen of 50CAN and author of The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives. We also engaged four national, state, and local tutoring leaders in a discussion with Cohen to further unpack her findings and how they relate to their programming on the ground.

I was thrilled to have the chance to moderate the discussion with Cohen about her engaging and actionable new book, which covers the history of tutoring in the U.S., its major proliferation as a post-pandemic learning recovery strategy, and her examination of so many school districts that made a big bet on tutoring by investing their ESSER dollars. I enjoyed asking her multiple questions about what has happened over the past five years and where we can go from here. Harkening back to CGLR’s session from last fall, Implementation and Sustainability: What Makes High-Impact Tutoring Work and the series we plan to continue throughout 2026, about successful implementation of Big Bet strategies, Cohen shared what she identified as aspects of implementation that lead to success for a district:

“I want to see someone who’s in charge of the [tutoring] program from the district. I want to see someone who has — as a significant part of their job — responsibility for overseeing tutoring implementation. I think if you don’t have leadership in the district, then where do schools go when they have questions? Schools need to have guidance on how/when to schedule tutoring. Like, when are you offering the tutoring and how? And how consistent is it? A lot of elementary schools in particular that have really adopted tutoring as a core practice have moved to a schedule that involves basically a period of the day that’s like an intervention block in which some kids are getting tutoring and some might be doing enrichment, some might be doing some other small group. So you want to see some kind of model like that.”

After my book talk with Cohen, I had the opportunity to engage in discussion with four outstanding leaders from national, state, and local tutoring programs. Johnny Blount of Literacy Mid-South in Memphis; Sherri Flagg, Ed.D., of Read United at United Way of Central Georgia; Crystal Rountree of Jumpstart for Young Children; and Kelli Soyer of the Iowa Reading Corps and the United Ways of Iowa each shared an overview of how their tutoring program works and the success they have achieved. These leaders also responded to what Cohen shared and asked her questions about her findings in connection to their work on the ground. This led to a robust and insightful conversation that went deeper into implementation, the role of parents, recruitment and training for tutors, and more. Rountree expressed how a key element in the book resonates with her and the work of Jumpstart:

“And Liz, I will say one thing that really resonated with me in your book was how it frames tutoring as not just an emergency intervention, but really as this core learning strategy. And from where I sit with young children who are on the ground with their tutors, that distinction really does matter a lot. It changes how we design programs, who we recruit, and how we measure success. Something that has come up for us is that the work is really relational, and tutoring works not just because of the academic content but also the caring adult that is working alongside the child.”

Many more important ideas were discussed by the educators who came together for this GLR Learning Tuesdays webinar, and we hope you found it informative and engaging. Please review the resources and the recording made available here for more information and plan to join us again next week for more insights on tutoring as a key learning recovery strategy and in all of our future sessions.