Provider: North Carolina Education Corps (NC Ed Corps)
Program Description
North Carolina Education Corps is a nonprofit that partners with school districts rather than running its own curriculum. It recruits, hires, and trains tutors and coaches them throughout the year. A high school diploma is the minimum requirement for tutors, though many have more education or prior teaching experience. Tutors work with small groups of up to 4 students, at least 3 times a week, for 30 minutes a session, during the school day.
Findings
- Significant positive effect: Students gained just over one extra month of learning (+0.15 SDs) based on DIBELS reading scores. A separate check of third graders’ performance on North Carolina’s state reading test also trended positive but wasn’t statistically significant.
- Students who participated received, on average, 21.2 hours of tutoring. 85% of assigned students participated at all; most who didn’t were redirected to other support services like English-learner help instead.
- The benefit was strongest for students who were not chronically absent. Boys showed a bigger gain than girls, mainly because girls in the control group improved a lot on their own, suggesting girls may have been benefiting more from typical Tier 1 instruction. The largest positive impacts were observed among schools with the lowest average dosage, and mid-year benchmarks suggested that the second semester of dosage may not have been necessary to achieve positive effects.
- Students in the comparison group stayed in their school’s normal support system: small reading groups, other pull-out programs, or existing reading interventions, just without an NC Ed Corps tutor. NC Ed Corps tutoring typically took place during each school’s small group/intervention time.
- About half of comparison-group students also received additional reading help. The type of help varied widely. This includes students at two schools where that help used the mClass curriculum, the same curriculum used by NC Ed Corps. As a result, the study may understate NC Ed Corps’s true impact.
| Research Partner | The University of Michigan Youth Policy Lab |
| Study Year | 2024-25 |
| Study Location | Nine elementary schools in one large North Carolina school district |
| Modality | In-Person |
| Study Design | RCT (Randomized Controlled Trial) |
| Total Sample | 867 students randomly assigned (312 to tutoring, 555 to the comparison group) |
| Characteristics of Treatment Group | Female: 54% Black/African American: 41% Hispanic: 39% White: 11% Two or More Races: 6% Asian/Pacific Islander: 3% English Language Learner: 28% Students with Disabilities (IEP): 14% Free/Reduced Price Lunch: Not reported |
| Subject | Reading/ELA |
| Grades | K, 1, 2, 3 |
| Average Actual Dosage | 21.2 hours |
| Scheduled Dosage | 25.5 hours |
For more about Accelerate’s takeaways from this study, check out the Accelerate blog.
