High-dosage tutoring is receiving a lot of buzz as a promising tool to address learning loss in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. But unlike vaccines, successful tutoring programs are challenging to scale with fidelity.
In this paper, long-time educators Michael Goldstein and Bowen Paulle recommend:
- Evaluating tutoring programs and measuring their results.
- Abandoning those that don’t work.
- Conditionally scaling those that do work in small settings, all while focusing on desired program outcomes, not inputs.
To be sure, high-dosage tutoring helps many children. But effectively scaling up small programs is no easy feat. Context and quality matter. If policymakers make well-informed choices and do more than just throw money at these programs, high-dosage tutoring can be grown to benefit many more students than it already does.
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