In July 2025, Congress created the largest potential new source of education funding in a generation. Embedded inside the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Public Law 119-21) is Section 25F of the tax code establishing a federal scholarship tax credit. This “Education Freedom Tax Credit” is estimated to have the potential to channel anywhere from $800 million to $24 billion a year into K–12 education. The law includes academic tutoring as an allowable use. Given the overwhelming evidence about the effectiveness of high-impact tutoring (resulting in two to three additional months of learning for students when done well), that single phrase is an important opening.
After convening more than 135 stakeholders from across the high-impact tutoring field, one thing became clear – there is significant remaining distance between a promising statute and a program that actually delivers results to students. The initiative needs more regulatory clarity – and a stronger infrastructure inside states – or it runs the risk of exacerbating educational inequalities rather than supporting students who stand to benefit the most.
What the Law Does — and Doesn’t — Say
The basic mechanics of the law passed in July 2025 are straightforward. A donor gives money to a Scholarship Granting Organization, or SGO. The donor receives a rare federal tax credit that will directly reduce the donor’s tax bill. The SGO awards scholarships to eligible students — families earning up to 300 percent of area median income — who can then use those funds for approved educational expenses. Tutoring is on the approved list.
What the law does not do is define what “academic tutoring” means. It does not say whether a student enrolled in a public school can use a scholarship for tutoring delivered during the school day. It does not specify whether a school district can coordinate tutoring for a group of students using aggregated scholarship dollars, or whether each family must navigate the process individually. It does not distinguish between a well-designed tutoring program with trained tutors, aligned curriculum, and consistent sessions — and a homework-help app with no evidence of impact.
As of May 2026, those questions now sit with the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Treasury Department, which are writing the regulations that will govern how the program actually operates. The rules they produce will determine whether high-impact tutoring becomes a real, scalable option for millions of students — or whether the money flows to the lowest-common-denominator services that look like tutoring on paper but produce little in the classroom.
The Ghost of NCLB
Back in the year 2000, the No Child Left Behind Act funneled $500 million a year into “tutoring” as a supplementary service. Multiple large-scale evaluations found weak monitoring, poor recordkeeping, inconsistent provider quality, and virtually no measurable impact on student achievement. The program became a cautionary tale: when federal funds flow to tutoring without a meaningful definition, the market fills with providers who meet the letter of the law without demonstrating results.
The risk with SGOs is the same, but the scale is potentially far larger. And unlike the NCLB era, we now have an enormous body of evidence about what actually works. High-impact tutoring — frequent sessions, trained tutors, small groups, data-driven instruction — is the most effective student intervention in American education today. That conclusion comes not from a single study but from more than $7.5 billion in pandemic-era investments that produced hundreds of implementations and a growing library of rigorous evaluations. We know how to do this. The question is whether the rules will let us scale successful evidence-based tutoring solutions.
What 135 Stakeholders Are Telling Us
Recently, Accelerate, along with staff from the National Student Support Accelerator and the Partnership for Student Success, convened two working group meetings that brought together 135+ stakeholders from across the tutoring field — providers, researchers, state officials, and advocates — to develop coordinated feedback for the IRS rulemaking on donors and SGOs. The conversations were substantive, sometimes contentious, and ultimately clarifying. Six major themes emerged, and nearly all of them reveal how much work remains before this program can deliver on its promise.
Defining “tutoring” is the central vulnerability — and the hardest question.
Everyone agrees that “qualified tutoring expenditure” needs to mean something more specific than it does today in the federal statute. But how specific? Some participants pushed for a prescriptive definition anchored in the research: three or more sessions per week, small groups, curriculum aligned to student needs. Others — particularly practitioners running after-school and community-based programs — warned that a rigid weekly-frequency threshold would structurally exclude the very programs serving students in the settings where they’re available. A tutoring program that meets students twice a week consistently for an entire school year might produce better outcomes than one that aims for three sessions but delivers erratically. Should Treasury care about the input or the result? Without a meaningful definition, the market will flood with homework-help apps, AI study tools, and low-dosage services that consume scholarship dollars without moving the needle. With too rigid a definition, legitimate programs get locked out and states opt not to participate. The working group circled this tension across both meetings without fully resolving it — because there may be no clean answer.
Public school access must be stated, not assumed.
The existing SGO marketplace was built to help families pay for private school tuition. Nothing in the law prevents public school students from accessing tutoring scholarships, but nothing affirmatively tells them they can, either. The working group is asking Treasury to say so explicitly, because silence in this context is functionally exclusionary – without affirmation no SGO has a reason to build the infrastructure to serve public school students. The path of least resistance is to keep funding tuition and ignore the tutoring option entirely.
Eighty-five percent of parents support free tutoring for students who are below grade level — the most popular education policy in a recent survey of more than 23,000 parents, with strong bipartisan support. But support means nothing if the regulatory fine print quietly steers the money elsewhere. In Virginia, a $30 million tutoring funding initiative collapsed before it reached families who needed it the most, caught between conflicting state and federal requirements. Without an affirmative statement on public school eligibility, that pattern will repeat nationally.
State authority is both the political frame and the practical mechanism.
The working group converged on a strategically important insight: as states become increasingly influential in education, they should be allowed to set their own standards. States like Colorado, Louisiana and Arkansas already have quality frameworks for tutoring that are grounded in evidence they’ve gathered about their students.
The group proposed that Treasury reference the National Student Support Accelerator’s Design Principles as a ready-made baseline that states could voluntarily adopt, relieving IRS of the need to become a subject-matter expert in educational quality. But there is a real fear underneath this framing: if Treasury sets rigid federal standards, some states may simply opt out of tutoring as a scholarship category altogether.
Without schools, families won’t show up.
This theme sharpened considerably as the conversations deepened. Both meetings converged on a view the field has not stated bluntly enough: high-impact tutoring essentially requires a school partner to function at scale. The reason is behavioral, not bureaucratic. Without a school coordinating schedules, and familiar, trusted teachers reminding families, and embedding sessions into the rhythm of the school day, most families will not sustain the three-sessions-per-week cadence that the research says matters. The aspiration of families independently choosing providers from an SGO marketplace they’ve never encountered is just that — an aspiration. We have years of evidence from pandemic-era tutoring programs showing that attendance and dosage collapse when families are forced to manage logistics on their own. School-embedded or school-coordinated tutoring is the delivery model that produces results. The question is whether the program’s architecture recognizes that.
Even if schools are the right partner, can the money actually flow that way?
That’s the district aggregation question — and practitioners flagged it as potentially the most consequential operational question in the entire program. The statute envisions a family-level transaction: a family applies to an SGO, receives a scholarship, and uses it to pay a provider. But most high-impact tutoring providers don’t work that way. They contract with school districts to serve cohorts of students. If each family must independently find an SGO, apply for a scholarship, and then locate and contract with a provider on their own, the payment model is structurally incompatible with the delivery model that works. The entire ecosystem of providers who spent the last decade building school-district relationships would need to completely rebuild around individual family transactions — which is expensive, slow, and likely to produce exactly the low dosage and attendance the research warns against. If, on the other hand, districts can aggregate individual scholarships on behalf of a student cohort and contract with providers directly, the existing infrastructure becomes viable with relatively modest changes. The difference between these two interpretations is not marginal. It may determine whether the tutoring sector can participate at all.
The IRS doesn’t speak in the language of education data and recordkeeping.
The working group’s consistent position is that demographic tracking and outcome data are not bureaucratic overhead; they are the mechanism by which commitments to student access are enforced and transparency of all the SGOs can be upheld. But a clarifying insight emerged: the IRS’s primary institutional concern is following the money, not ensuring educational quality. Recordkeeping asks framed around financial accountability and fraud prevention — verifying that services were actually delivered, that providers are legitimate, that funds reached eligible families — are far more likely to land with IRS than asks framed around student outcomes. The challenge is designing a data floor that is meaningful enough to enforce access and catch fraud, but light enough for small community-based providers to manage without a compliance department.
Our Take
This program will not fail because tutoring doesn’t work. We already know it does. It will fail if the rules allow dollars to flow without any meaningful way to distinguish between what works and what doesn’t. We see two key paths forward to address these challenges.
The clearest way to provide this distinction is via regulatory language from Treasury that defines tutoring, allows user-friendly funding to public schools, and ensures the collection of meaningful data. The ideas outlined above and shared with the Treasury regulators would create a national framework for successful delivery of high quality tutoring to the highest need students.
If Treasury does not define tutoring in the regulations – and does not give states explicit authority to do so either – the question shifts from rulemaking to the marketplace itself. Even without a federal definition, Treasury could require SGOs to collect and publish basic data: which students received scholarships, which providers delivered services, and what those services looked like. That kind of transparency doesn’t pick winners — but it creates the conditions in which SGOs making the strongest commitments to quality can distinguish themselves from those that don’t. In a marketplace where donors and families can see what they’re getting, the organizations doing the best work have a fighting chance. Without that transparency, the advantage goes to whoever markets most aggressively, not whoever serves students most effectively and we risk repeating the central failure of past tutoring investments: a lot of public dollars spent with little student learning to show for it.
This program could unlock access to the most effective academic intervention we have — or it could quietly scale the least effective versions of it. Which path we take, as a field and as a country, will live in the details of the rules and in the actions states take.
Narric Rome is the Managing Director of Government Relations at Accelerate.
