At a recent conference on high-dosage tutoring, education leaders surveyed the tutoring landscape and found reasons for hope.
Just as federal funding for education is under threat, a growing number of states are taking the lead in embedding high-dosage tutoring programs during the school day across the nation’s more than 13,000 districts.
High-dosage tutoring is defined as a one-on-one or small-group targeted intervention delivered daily (or almost daily) by a consistent human tutor during the school day for a sustained period of time (10 to 36 weeks). High-dosage tutoring exploded in popularity during the pandemic as a way to combat the learning loss brought on during school shutdowns. And, for the nearly 200 researchers, educators, and policymakers who gathered recently at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., for the 2025 Annual Convening: The State of High-Dosage Tutoring, it has become a critical strategy for addressing the nation’s pervasive achievement gap that has left the nation’s most vulnerable students far behind.
“Tutoring is the most effective intervention for helping students catch up when it’s done right,” said Amanda Neitzel, director of research at ProvenTutoring and an assistant research scientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Education’s Center for Research and Reform in Education (CRRE). For Neitzel, a convening host and panelist on one of the conference’s plenary sessions, one surprising takeaway of the conference was not so much practical, but emotional. There was an undeniably upbeat, can-do vibe, she said.
“Everyone seemed to be of the mindset that high-dosage tutoring needs to become a regular part of the school day,” she said. “The money is gone. So, what do we do next?”
Neitzel then pointed to the trend of responsibility for tutoring shifting to the states, many of whom have proven eager to champion the practice. States like Florida, Alabama, and particularly Louisiana have shown strong support for high-dosage tutoring with strong results to match. In fourth-grade reading, Louisiana leaped from last in the 2019 state rankings to 16th in the most recent Nation’s Report Card. It was a remarkable rise attributed to a comprehensive approach to improving literacy that included a state-driven effort to provide high-dosage tutoring to struggling readers.
“They had a very clear, laser-focused vision for how tutoring was going to work,” Neitzel said. “There was a lot of momentum and investment at the state level to support it at the district and local levels.”
The convening was co-hosted by Accelerate, a nonprofit funder of high-dosage tutoring research, and ProvenTutoring, a nonprofit initiative housed at CRRE. Despite the challenges, attendees were resolute and candid.
“It was a roomful of invested individuals steeped in this work,” said Jennifer Krajewski, director of outreach and engagement for ProvenTutoring. “People were asking questions, sharing ideas, and being really vulnerable about what wasn’t working. It wasn’t just success stories—it was real problem-solving.”
