When the U.S. Department of Education released its FY 2025 Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant awards, it sent an unmistakable signal: high-impact tutoring is now a federal education strategy. For the first time, the Department included High-Impact Tutoring as a dedicated Competitive Preference Priority, adding extra points to tutoring-focused applicants. The result: 11 funded projects center on high-impact tutoring, representing nearly $130 million across 15+ states and tribal nations.
At Accelerate’s annual convening in February, Assistant Secretary of Education Kirsten Baesler and a panel of state EIR grant recipients described this level of investment from the federal government as representing a true shift to tutoring becoming a widespread intervention in American public schools. The next five years represent a rare window. There is ample, strong evidence for tutoring. There is state level action. There is public demand.
The EIR Portfolio
The awards split across two EIR tiers: four Expansion grants totaling $58.8 million (requiring strong prior evidence) and seven Mid-Phase grants totaling $69.9 million (requiring moderate evidence). The geographic reach is striking—rural, tribal, urban, and suburban communities across more than a dozen states. HIT grants account for nearly half the entire FY 2025 EIR cohort.
| Grantee | State(s) | Funding | Evaluator |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arkansas DOE | AR | $15.0M | Stanford |
| Louisiana DOE | LA | $15.0M | Johns Hopkins CRRE |
| Texas A&M | TX, MS | $15.0M | Johns Hopkins CRRE |
| Accelerate | OK | $13.8M | Mathematica |
| CitySchools Collaborative | DC, MD, VA | $10.0M | Bellwether |
| Massachusetts DESE | MA | $10.0M | Johns Hopkins CRRE |
| Indiana DOE | IN | $10.0M | WestEd |
| EDC | ME, NY, BIE | $10.0M | EDC (independent) |
| NFEAIE | NM, AZ | $10.0M | WestEd |
| United Way (MS) | MS | $10.0M | RAND |
| Montana OPI | MT | $9.9M | Ed. Northwest |
What Stands Out
States are leading, not just hosting. Five grantees are state education agencies (SEAs)—Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Montana—a departure from earlier EIR rounds dominated by nonprofits and universities. States are now designing and managing tutoring as core literacy infrastructure. This reinforces the need to support state education agencies at a moment when states hold more autonomy and responsibility than ever.
Rewarding proven providers. Air Reading, a Science of Reading-aligned virtual tutoring program, is the implementation partner in three separate awards: Louisiana, Arkansas, and Accelerate’s Oklahoma project. The Air Reading model has alreadyproven effectiveness in multiple states based on Accelerate-funded research, and is now growing accordingly. The same model tested simultaneously across different state contexts, student populations, and governance structures will produce an unusually comprehensive evidence base. Louisiana’s three-arm cluster RCT is powered to detect effects as small as +0.11 SD—smaller than Air Reading’s prior results—while Accelerate’s multi-arm design compares Air Reading against paraeducator-delivered ECRI tutoring.
Mississippi gets a double dose. United Way of West Central Mississippi is embedding tutoring in 130 community-based afterschool centers across 21 rural counties, while Texas A&M’s ROOTS project also includes Mississippi schools among its 100 rural sites. Two federally funded HIT studies running simultaneously could make Mississippi one of the most studied states in the country for rural tutoring effectiveness.
Innovative workforce models abound. Indiana’s Tutor-CogSci model organizes college students, high schoolers, and aides into learning design teams connected to cognitive scientists at Notre Dame, Purdue, and IU—treating tutoring as a pipeline to the teaching profession. EDC recruits military spouses through a Department of Defense employment program to deliver virtual tutoring to grades 6–7 students, the only project in the cohort targeting adolescent readers. Montana deploys certified teachers nationally for virtual one-on-one literacy sessions. And Texas A&M pairs community tutors with AI-powered Amira Learning technology in an “edupreneurship” model designed for the nearly 10 million rural students nationwide.
Accountability gets real. Accelerate grantee CitySchools Collaborative isn’t testing whether tutoring works—it’s testing whether structured coaching and technical assistance improve how schools implement it, across sites in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Its model includes outcomes-based contracts requiring tutoring providers to hit 80% student dosage targets for full payment. Meanwhile, Massachusetts is asking whether an intensive first year of tutoring can be sustained with a lighter-touch follow-up—a dosage question with major implications for state budgets.
Tribal communities are centered. NFEAIE’s LITE initiative works with 60 Bureau of Indian Education-funded schools across tribal nations in New Mexico and Arizona, integrating high-quality instructional materials with aligned tutoring. Montana and EDC also serve BIE-administered schools—a meaningful cluster of investment in historically underserved communities.
Looking Ahead
Most grants follow a five-year structure, and the first major findings will emerge around 2028–2029. By 2030, the field will have causal evidence from randomized trials spanning 15+ states and tribal nations, with hard data on dosage, cost-effectiveness, workforce models, and sustainability. Accelerate’s open-source DATAS cost framework, aligned to IES’ SEER principles, could give states a common language for comparing tutoring investments.
This cohort does have gaps—it’s literacy-only by design, with limited attention to math, English learners, and special education. But the strategic signal is unmistakable: the federal government has validated high-impact tutoring as a category worthy of dedicated investment, and states are stepping up to own it. The field has moved past “Does tutoring work?” and into the harder question: “How do we make it work everywhere, at a cost communities can sustain?”
Interested in further details on the EIR tutoring grants? Read the full analysis online here.
Narric Rome is the Managing Director of Government Relations at Accelerate.
