Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP Photo
The second Trump administration’s two defining education policy features seem to be a voucher system that functions as a tax haven and the defunding of the Department of Education.
The former will siphon tax money out of America’s public schools that the vast majority of students attend. The latter will reduce urgently needed support and make it significantly more difficult to track how America’s students are performing, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
NAEP, the “gold standard” assessment for examining student achievement, has been around for decades. The program’s reading and math tests are congressionally mandated to occur every two years, testing the nation’s eighth and fourth graders.
This is all occurring in a national context where America’s schools and students have not recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s NAEP scores vastly underperformed pre-pandemic levels, and not a single state in the country improved both reading and math scores.
But states are increasingly on their own as they seek new policies to support students.
One such policy is high-impact tutoring, which has been embraced by municipalities like Oakland, California, as well as states like Tennessee. According to Nancy Waymack, policy director of the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University, high-impact tutoring programs have a few key requirements. These include frequent meetings (three to five times a week), students meeting with the same tutor, small class sizes (no more than three pupils per tutor), and high-quality curricula similar to what students are engaging with in the classroom.
Training for high-impact tutors varies depending on key distinctions such as the experience a prospective tutor might have and the needs of the community they will be tutoring within. In an ideal program, tutors should be given one-on-one coaching and individualized feedback to help maximize their effectiveness within the classroom.
In an ideal high-impact tutoring program, tutors are integrated into their student’s broader educational environment. Tutors should proactively share information about the students’ progress with teachers and school administrators to help facilitate and improve the tutoring programs.
Who these tutors are varies greatly depending on the available pool in local communities. In the Oakland program, two organizations that ran tutoring programs pulled from the local community and recruited parents and guardians to tutor children in Oakland Unified School District.
Programs in New York City have relied on a different pool of potential applicants to fuel high-impact tutoring programs. Katie Pace Miles co-founded the City University of New York (CUNY) Reading Corps in 2021 as New York City public schools were grappling with a tumultuous online learning environment in the thick of the pandemic.
The program trains CUNY students to act as tutors while pursuing training to become classroom teachers implementing high-impact curriculum, and it currently services roughly 2,300 public schools with 650 tutors.
“It was enthralling to see how impactful this was to both the pre-service teachers at the university who were getting their undergrad or grad degree to be certified teachers,” Miles told the Prospect. “And we saw gains for the students during the pandemic, when overwhelmingly there was learning loss for particularly vulnerable populations of students.”
High-impact tutoring gigs could open up the pathway for prospective teachers at a moment when every state in the country is dealing with a shortage of teachers. Currently, high-impact tutoring programs like CUNY Reading Corps in New York City are funded primarily by philanthropic endeavors and money in the city’s budget earmarked for those programs.
Despite the upside of a high-impact tutoring pilot programs, the New York state legislature has so far failed to advance legislation that would create such a program. Funding from a state grant program could help high-impact tutoring providers in New York City, like CUNY Reading Corps and ExpandED, scale up their programs to meet the growing demand within the city.
In upstate New York, funding from grants could help programs like the Reading Institute (Miles’s other endeavor) and Stanford University's National Student Support Accelerator train local communities to implement programs in communities that so far have no access to this kind of effective tutoring.
Jacquelyn Martell is the executive director of Education Reform Now NY, an advocacy group that has supported various education policies ranging from legacy admissions bans at public universities and support for public charter schools.
The native New Yorker sees high-impact tutoring as an opportunity to address not just COVID-related learning loss but also systemic failures that have occurred in New York’s public school system.
In April, she co-wrote an op-ed with state Sen. Nathalia Fernandez and Assemblymember Brian Cunningham supporting a proposal, ultimately unsuccessful, for a five-year investment of $20 million per year to fund high-impact tutoring pilot programs across the state.
The plan would have created a process for local districts, or tutoring providers, to apply for grants. Grant applications for underserved students in low-income communities would be prioritized for funding. Martell noted that the bill was a victim of competing education policies: Other plans, particularly New York state’s new cellphone ban, were given priority in the 2026 budget.
In a statement provided to the Prospect, Assemblymember Cunningham said, “This bill responds to an urgent need we see in districts like mine. I worked to build support for an approach that reflects what the research shows and is designed to reach students who have struggled most with post-pandemic learning loss. There’s still real potential for this policy in the next session, and I’m hopeful the groundwork we laid this year will help it gain traction.”
In the age of deep federal budget cuts and COVID learning loss, states can no longer afford to deprioritize education. High-impact tutoring programs could help students turn the tide on low NAEP scores, but these programs only work if states provide them with the resources needed to implement high-impact curriculums over the long term.
Democrats must work to champion effective education policy as an alternative to the Republican party’s privatization dreams. Expanding high-impact tutoring to public schools is the exact kind of policy that could help stabilize America’s public schools, but doing so requires a political will Democrats have seemingly lacked in recent years. State legislators must be willing to provide providers with the resources, time, and (most importantly) funding to see the desperately needed results high-impact tutoring providers believe their programs could deliver.
So far, Democrats in Albany have been unwilling to do so.
