2022 CEA Grantees

AIR Tutors, in partnership with WestEd, will conduct a randomized controlled trial evaluation of its high dosage math tutoring program. AIR Tutors will examine the impact of its program on English learners and will additionally seek to understand whether learning gains persist beyond one year. AIR Tutors will partner with school districts to enroll historically underserved student groups, including English learners, in grades 4-6.

Amira Learning will combine the mentorship of high school and college-age tutors with the power of Amira’s intelligent instructional and diagnostic platform, which is fueled by artificial intelligence and rooted in the science of reading, to deliver tutoring. Amira will partner with organizations in California’s Central Valley to recruit and train young adults to tutor struggling readers in grades 1-5. Amira will study whether the hybrid mentorship model produces better results than the use of the Amira platform alone, for students generally and also for specific subgroups.

Amplify provides virtual tutoring to students to accelerate learning in reading and foundational literacy skills. In the upcoming school year, Amplify will serve over 200,000 students in grades K-6 across multiple states. Amplify’s full-service tutoring model provides virtual reading tutoring to small groups of students for 30 minutes per session, three days per week. Amplify recruits, manages, trains, and develops all tutors – prioritizing local recruitment of tutors when possible.

Amplify requires tutors to complete a rigorous training program to learn to accurately administer mCLASS DIBELS 8th Edition assessments, use student data effectively, deliver tutoring interventions, and use best practices for engaging students. Amplify also provides ongoing professional development for tutors, observation sessions with a senior literacy coach, tutor office hours, and other weekly connections to support tutors. Ultimately, Amplify seeks to support students to improve their literacy skills, gain confidence in reading, build a strong relationship with a caring adult, and participate in a fun and safe learning environment. 

Baltimore City Public Schools (“City Schools”) continues to invest in providing K-12 students access to high dosage tutoring during the school day as a critical lever for academic acceleration and personalized learning. As City Schools expands its portfolio of tutoring programs, the district seeks to understand the effectiveness of its established systems and structures for maximizing the efficacy and compatibility of the various models being implemented by internal, vendor, and local community-based providers within the school system. This grant will support the qualitative analysis needed to understand the impact of these efforts, the continuous improvement of tutoring coordination and implementation, and the ability to refine guidance on the systems, structures, and processes needed to maximize the effectiveness of sustainable tutoring in City Schools.

Black Hills Special Services Cooperative (BHSSC), in partnership with Technology and Innovation in Education (TIE), will work with the Red Cloud Indian School to serve learners seeking additional academic support. Red Cloud Indian School is located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The Pine Ridge Reservation shares the same geography with the OglalaSioux Tribe which is one of nine Native Nations in the State of South Dakota. TIE will oversee program content, processes, implementation, and data collection. TIE will assist in the development of a responsive math and ELA tutoring  program, serving students in grades K-12 during the school day, and in turn, help develop the evidence base on how rural school districts can launch and scale high-impact tutoring programs.

Cambiar Education, through its Illuminate Literacy program, will develop, test, and refine a tech-enabled literacy tool across multiple settings (e.g., school, tutor, home) and partners. Illuminate will evaluate to what extent foundational reading instruction typically delivered by a tutor can be successfully delivered in combination with their tech-enabled literary tools, with the goal of freeing up tutor capacity for other student supports. Initial prototypes will focus on foundational reading instruction for students in early elementary grades.

Deans for Impact (DFI) will convene educator preparation programs that are mobilizing teacher-candidates to serve as tutors in high-need schools, establishing the Aspiring Teachers as Tutors Network and developing a policy framework for strengthening the tutor-to-teacher pipeline. DFI will also develop and test the effectiveness of tutor training modules to prepare aspiring teachers to serve as tutors, initially focused on math in grades K-8. Against the backdrop of challenges with tutor supply in the 2021-22 school year and declining interest in the teaching profession, DFI seeks to increase the number of future teachers serving as tutors– both as a means of sustainably scaling tutoring to more K-12 students and as a strategy for strengthening pathways into teaching.

Great Oaks Foundation (GO Foundation) will recruit, train, and support a corps of young adults who are placed in partner schools where they intensively tutor students as a part of a year of service through AmeriCorps. These tutors are called Fellows to encompass the multiple roles they play to tutor as well as mentor the students with whom they are matched. The GO Foundation will support schools in providing math and ELA tutoring to students in grades 3-12. Drawing on over a decade of experience, the GO Foundation works with school partners to develop a coherent strategy for the deployment of tutors, including additional training for tutors, support with scheduling, establishing treatment groups, and contingency planning. GO has formulated 10 essential tutoring program elements that are based on its own implementation experience as well as academic research. The GO Foundation’s model offers a unique opportunity to address some of the logistical challenges that perplexed educators last year. GO intentionally recruits a diverse group of tutors who reflect the children it serves and invests in its Fellows’ professional development.

Green Dot Public Schools will expand its current tutoring program, which provides small-group math instruction to 6th and 9th graders, to serve 16 schools in school year 2022-23. Green Dot’s tutoring model is unique as it replaces (rather than supplements) students’ remedial math course; tutors deliver curricular material directly to small groups of students who are on the “cusp” of proficiency. Green Dot is partnering with Saga Education to provide each tutor with individualized feedback and coaching through videotaped lessons. Green Dot will also work with Saga Education to co-design professional development to ensure all tutors have a foundation in instruction, classroom management, curriculum interpretation, and lesson cycle design. In the coming year, Green Dot hopes to learn more about how its model can be implemented in different contexts and what challenges may arise.

Guilford County Schools is building on its previous years of success launching high-impact tutoring programs across the county. Guilford is partnering with local HBCUs and other institutions of higher education, as well as community members and even current high school students, to bring in-person tutoring to the district to support ELA, math, and science across all grades. Guilford targets the students most in need of tutoring support based on prior performance. Over the course of the school year, Guilford hopes to better understand how additional tutor support focused on building student relationships can lead to better student outcomes. Learning from the challenges and successes of its program, Guilford can help the field better understand how districts can scale and sustain a multi-year tutoring strategy.

Ignite! Reading is a tutoring service provider offering virtual early literacy instruction with tutors trained in the Science of Reading. The organization works with school districts to embed 15 minutes of daily tutoring into the school day, providing each student with 1:1 virtual tutoring in foundational reading skills with a trained reading tutor. In school year 2023-24, Ignite! Reading will serve 10,000 students in grades K-8. Ignite! will also participate in a rigorous evaluation with Accelerate’s support.

JUMP Math is a nonprofit curriculum provider that is developing tutoring content aligned with its core curriculum. Through this grant, JUMP Math will conduct a one year pilot with diverse schools in Michigan and rural Louisiana. JUMP Math’s resources will be paired with Pearl’s tutoring platform and data collection tools to equip tutors with JUMP Math’s evidence-based methodology and resources, including a micro-tutor certification that tutors will complete prior to supporting students. They will serve 300 students in grades 1-9, seeking to develop students’ confidence and enthusiasm for math through an improved understanding of the subject. Their aim is to inform the field’s understanding of how alignment between core instructional materials and tutoring materials can drive student outcomes.

New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) will  recruit a cadre of tutors, including high school seniors and college students, to deliver high-impact tutoring across the New Orleans area. Working with the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (ERA-NOLA), NSNO will learn more about the effectiveness of the student-to-student tutoring model and whether early exposure to working with students influences tutors’ decisions to pursue teaching as a career. NSNO will partner with local universities, including Tulane University, Dillard University, and the University of New Orleans, to recruit tutors who will serve students in some of New Orleans’ largest charter management organizations. NSNO’s tutoring program will focus on students in grades 3-4 and 6-7 who scored below proficient on the 2022 state assessment. This project will deliver valuable findings about the efficacy of recruiting high school and college students as tutors, and also has the potential to cultivate more prospective teachers in the New Orleans’ teacher pipeline.

Once is an early-reading program for kindergarten that delivers daily, one-on-one, in-person instruction. Through this grant, they will serve approximately 4,800 kindergarten students. Once staff will remotely train and coach school-based support staff and/or paraprofessionals to follow a scripted curriculum based on the Science of Reading. All instructional sessions are video recorded and instructors receive weekly, live video coaching from the Once team providing tactical suggestions on improving instruction. Once hopes to examine the use of direct instruction in tutoring, the use of existing school staff as tutors, and the role of video-based coaching for tutors. 

OnYourMark Education (OnYourMark) is an early literacy tutoring service providing virtual, individualized, high-dosage instruction focused on foundational early literacy skills. OnYourMark is proposing a decreased dosage model for students to better understand how much time is necessary for a tutoring session to have a marked impact on student literacy achievement. They plan on serving 500 students in grades K-2 through virtual literacy tutoring.

Pearl’s tutor intelligence platform provides technical scaffolding to manage tutor operations at any scale while consistently collecting data across both in-person and online instruction. Within this platform, Pearl can also build tools to integrate data across tutoring platforms and traditional data sources like School Information Systems (SIS). Pearl aims to increase the speed at which all partners can roll out high-impact tutoring while removing the burden of data collection from disparate sources. By streamlining data collection and management, Pearl empowers its partners to identify gaps and improve program design in real time. Pearl will serve students in more than 100 schools, partnering with districts participating in the ESSER-funded Illinois Tutoring Initiative and with schools using the OnYourMark tutoring program.

ProvenTutoring, an initiative housed at the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University, will conduct research to understand how schools can improve the adoption, implementation, and scaling of tutoring models. ProvenTutoring plans to test how to best support school leaders in selecting, planning for, and providing ongoing support for highly effective tutoring models during the school day. Additionally, ProvenTutoring will build understanding around educator decision making when adopting a tutoring model and will identify barriers to scale as experienced by providers. The team is collaborating with districts nationally to support the implementation of high-impact tutoring. Through a partnership with the Colorado Department of Education, ProvenTutoring will provide technical assistance to district grantees of its High Impact Tutoring Program. ProvenTutoring’s research design is unique, given their experience bridging the gap between research and practice by matchmaking districts with research-evaluated tutoring models.

Reading Partners empowers students in reading and beyond by providing access to individualized literacy tutoring powered by community volunteers. During the 2023-24 school year, Reading Partners will serve 7,000 students in grades K-4 in 187 schools in 12 regions across the country. Reading Partners is investing in the scale and evaluation of Reading Partners Connects, or RPCx, the online version of their widely researched in-person tutoring program.

Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) will develop state-level policies and systems to support the scaling and sustainability of high-impact tutoring. To help source qualified tutors, RIDE will expand its menu of vetted tutoring providers and pilot a new “trainee-as-tutor” model that connects trainee teachers in teacher prep programs with schools in need of tutors. The state will also test the use of a regional tutoring coordinator–a new full-time position–to help districts with the staffing capacity they need to launch new tutoring programs. The Annenberg Institute at Brown University will study the lessons learned from RIDE’s work and other states to create a policy report on how to develop a replicable, state-level model for scaling and sustaining high-impact tutoring.

San Francisco Education Fund (SFEF) will provide virtual literacy tutoring to thousands of students citywide through the BookNook platform. The program will focus primarily on serving students in grades 2-5 who are not yet on grade level in reading. SFEF will conduct an ANCOVA study to examine the impact of the BookNook tutoring.

Southern Education Foundation (SEF) will support up to eight school districts in developing and fielding outcomes based bid documents and contracts, making a substantial portion of payment to tutoring vendors conditional on evidence of student growth. SEF’s model for outcomes-based contracts (OBC) will provide critical guidance for the field that may be especially useful when school systems reach the end of their COVID-19 stimulus funding. SEF will build on its first year of OBC work, having supported four school districts in launching OBC for math tutoring  programs in the 2021-22 school year. In the coming year, SEF will partner with districts to create model OBC bid documents and contracts and will assist the districts in tracking student progress toward the project’s goals. The goals of this project include improved student achievement, a strong vendor response, ensuring that contracts are viable between partners, and establishing a competitive landscape for improving student outcomes.

Teach For America (TFA) will conduct an evaluation of its Ignite Fellowship to understand how the tutoring program impacts student outcomes and whether participation in the program influences tutors to become teachers. TFA’s Ignite Fellowship is a national tutoring corps, composed primarily of current college students, and is designed with a dual focus on academic acceleration and student well-being. It aims to recruit and hire exceptional fellows, strategically align with school partners, and support ongoing training of fellows working with students. Fellows provide virtual tutoring, during the school day, with a focus on early elementary reading and middle school math.

The ASSISTments Foundation (TAF) will pilot a tutoring program based on its flagship product, ASSISTments, a free math practice and assessment tool that provides students with immediate feedback and gives teachers data to effectively implement their curricula. TAF’s model will support paraprofessionals who are serving as tutors by leveraging the ASSISTments tool. TAF will pilot its math tutoring program in Baltimore City Public Schools across a large number of schools to target students in grades 3-8. While tutors will be hired by the school district, TAF will provide the relevant tools and training for the district to implement high-impact tutoring with  paraprofessionals.

The Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR), in partnership with the CALDER at the American Institutes for Research and NWEA, will provide a consortium of mid- and large-sized districts–and the field generally–with an understanding of how well their COVID-19 academic recovery strategies like high-impact tutoring are working. This research will help guide recovery efforts and inform how districts and states allocate limited resources when ESSER funding ends. The research team will work with districts who collectively serve over 700,000 enrolled students. Using NWEA MAP interim assessment data, the team will provide districts with information at multiple points during the year so they can make course corrections in their recovery strategies as needed. The team will publish reports of lessons learned from these districts to help guide recovery efforts in the broader field.

The Commit Partnership will support school districts and charter networks in the Dallas region to embed the principles of high-impact tutoring into their overall instructional framework. Commit’s support for districts is critical as some Texas schools are still grappling with how to deliver tutoring to all struggling students, as required under a sweeping new Texas law. As other districts shift their focus from compliance to excellence, Commit will be a crucial partner in helping system leaders embed research-backed principles into their tutoring models. Commit will support districts by convening district leaders together monthly in tutoring focused learning communities that will ultimately support the expansion of high-dosage tutoring. Continuing the work they began last year, Commit will serve as a key partner of Dallas’s regional tutoring effort. They will continue to engage deeply with Dallas-area superintendents and other cabinet-level
leaders to build an understanding of high-dosage tutoring as a priority and to develop aligned local policy and action.

The Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE), a two-time Accelerate grantee, will partner with Knox County Schools to integrate instructionally coherent high-dosage tutoring (HDT) models into their overall strategy for early grades literacy intervention. The project will leverage a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the impact of HDT on students typically identified as Tier II or Tier III based on their performance on aimswebPLUS. The study will address the variance between these settings and answer questions about the impact of HDT on student outcomes. Four schools will be selected for support and analysis, representing at least 500 students. SCORE believes in the power of HDT to support student learning and is honored to use the Accelerate funds to support Knox County Schools’ efforts to integrate HDT into their intervention strategy, taking advantage of the district’s longstanding practices in assigning students to HDT, Tier II, or Tier III interventions based on their aimswebPLUS performance.

Zearn is the nonprofit educational organization behind the highly-rated math learning platform Zearn Math. Zearn has been adopted by state education agencies and large urban districts nationwide to help support students’ math learning through core math instruction, high-impact tutoring, summer learning and intervention time. In Tennessee, Zearn Math was selected through a competitive process to provide math learning content and real-time progress monitoring for districts participating in TN ALL Corps, a nationally recognized tutoring model endorsed by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.