Nashville, Tenn. (June 12, 2024)—The national nonprofit Accelerate today announced the organizations that will receive funding through its 2024 Call to Effective Action (CEA) grant program. Started in 2022, the CEA program helps innovative tutoring vendors launch, research, and grow classroom-ready tutoring programs.
This year’s grantees will join a community of nonprofit, for-profit, and public sector organizations committed to developing and scaling research-backed tutoring models to improve student outcomes, especially for historically underserved students. In its selection process, Accelerate prioritized organizations with a demonstrated potential to scale and a commitment to building evidence. Six of Accelerate’s 2024 grants will support returning grantees as they continue building a body of data for their tutoring models. In addition to the monetary grant award, organizations will be paired with an academic research partner who will help design randomized-control trials to prove their impact on student learning. Alongside the Call to Effective Action, Accelerate makes grants to states through its States Leading Recovery Program, and has funded and sponsored dozens of studies.
“High-dosage tutoring continues to be the most effective known academic intervention, outperforming all others including extended learning time and reduced class sizes,” said Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate. “We have a moral obligation to this generation of students to catch them up from pandemic-era learning losses. At the same time, schools have limited time and money. So the question now is: How can we build evidence quickly to demonstrate which programs are most cost-effective?”
The 2024 CEA grantees are:
- Air Reading
- Carnegie Learning
- Cignition
- CityTutor DC
- Coursemojo
- ExpandED Schools
- Future Forward
- Hamilton County Schools
- Intervene K-12
- Literacy Mid-South*
- Magpie Literacy (formerly Illuminate Literacy)
- Math Corps
- NC Education Corps
- Off2Class
- OKO Labs
- PeerTeach
- PLUS – Carnegie Mellon University
- Teachley
- Tennessee SCORE
These grantees operate in nearly 650 schools across 21 states, serving about 60,500 students nationwide. They employ a range of models including in-person, virtual synchronous and asynchronous, and hybrid, and have a maximum tutor-to-student ratio of 1:5. Tutors include teacher candidates, certified teachers, paraprofessionals, college students, volunteers, community members, peers, parents, college graduates, and AmeriCorps fellows.
This announcement follows Accelerate’s recent reanalysis of high-quality tutoring data, released in May, which introduced a novel approach to evaluating the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of tutoring programs. Accelerate will connect its grantees with researchers to address the priority areas on Accelerate’s Research Agenda, including:
- Understudied student groups, such as those older than 2nd grade, those with IEPs, and multilingual students
- Rigorous study design, which requires sample sizes of 350 students or more
- Study outcomes that are relevant to policymakers and show the long-term impacts of tutoring on student test scores
- Data collection and replication to demonstrate the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of tutoring programs in different school settings
“The organizations that we chose for this grantee cohort bring a range of approaches and models and tutor types, and our hope is that at the end of this grant year, they will each have a body of research they can point to that shows districts how effective their programs are,” said Jennifer Bronson, Managing Director of Programs for Accelerate. “School districts can’t make evidence-informed decisions about what interventions work best for their students unless they have high-quality, authoritative evidence, and the Call to Effective Action program fills that need.”For more information about the Call to Effective Action program and the 2024 cohort of grantees, please visit accelerate.us/cea.
*Updated on October 18, 2024: We are pleased to add Literacy Mid-South to this cohort of grantees. For over 50 years, Literacy Mid-South has helped learners of all backgrounds and ages – from young children to adults – achieve the critical literacy skills they need to navigate the world. Accelerate is particularly thrilled to support the evaluation of their tutoring model, Tutor901, through a rigorous Randomized Controlled Trial.
