How High-Impact Tutoring Is Reshaping Post-Pandemic Learning Recovery 

In the wake of the pandemic, tutoring has become a central strategy for helping students recover academically but not all tutoring is created equal. Liz Cohen, vice president of policy at 50CAN, has been closely studying the rapid rise of tutoring programs across the country, especially the emergence of high-impact tutoring as the gold standard.

“There's a funny thing about tutoring is that there's a lot of flexibility in it,” Cohen says. “So, in some places it might look like other interventions and in other places it might not. But one thing I want to be really clear about just to start with is that high-impact tutoring in particular is not homework help and it is not on demand.” Instead, high impact tutoring is structured, frequent, and aligned to what students are learning in school: at least three sessions a week, 30 minutes or more, in groups of four students or fewer, with the same tutor each time. Research shows that when tutoring is consistent and connected to classroom instruction, students make significantly greater learning gains, especially in early literacy and math.

Cohen points to examples like Tennessee, Louisiana, and district leaders in places like Baltimore and Guilford County, where strong funding, clear expectations, and hands-on implementation support led to meaningful results. But scaling tutoring can be complicated. As Cohen discovered and reveals in her new Harvard Education Press title, The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives, there’s many details that need to come together tutoring to be a success.

“What I believe is the most powerful part of the story of the high-impact tutoring movement and the tutoring movement at large that's happened in the last five years in America is that it's a human centered story that is in part empowered by tech,” Cohen says. “This is fundamentally a story about humans, and it's a story about the fact that young people in America are very hungry for meaningful relationships with adults, and those can be young adults in high school and college, or they can be older adults too.”

In this episode, Cohen tells us what has made high-impact tutoring so valuable, how districts are successfully implementing tutoring, and how it has become more than just as an academic intervention.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I am Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

Tutoring has become a centerpiece of pandemic recovery in schools, but Liz Cohen knows not all tutoring is the same. By spring 2023, about 80% of school districts were offering some form of tutoring. Liz is the vice president of policy at 50CAN. She's been digging into this rapid response and a system that usually moves slowly looking at what it tells us about how schools support students. High-impact tutoring has emerged as the gold standard, but the way it's done matters. First, I asked Liz to explain the difference between high-impact tutoring and traditional tutoring.

LIZ COHEN: There are a few different elements that make up what we consider now the gold standard of high-impact tutoring, and they are that students meet at least three days a week for at least 30 minutes at a time in small groups of no more than four students with a consistent adult tutor, so the same tutor every time. And that it's aligned with, this is the least surprising part, right? It's aligned with what it is that the students are learning in school is really what makes it the best. It doesn't have to be using the exact same curriculum. There are successful tutoring programs that have curricula that are different, but they need to be aligned with the curricula that students are learning so that they're mastering the skills that they need to master.

JILL ANDERSON: Can you tell me a little bit about how this might look different from other supports a child might receive in the day, like if they're going off for special reading services or some one-on-one attention?

LIZ COHEN: So, there's a funny thing about tutoring is that there's a lot of flexibility in it. So, in some places it might look like other interventions and in other places it might not. But one thing I want to be really clear about just to start with is that high-impact tutoring in particular is not homework help and it is not on demand. So, it is not a child saying, "Can you help me? I don't understand this." Or even a teacher saying, "Hey, I see that what we did today you didn't quite get. Do you want to stop in at lunch and let's review it?" That is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a consistent program that usually lasts anywhere from eight to 12-week sessions with this consistent multi-day a week approach.

Now in terms of other supports, academic supports or interventions that might happen in the classroom, first of all, one is the dosage is often different because high-impact tutoring, which also is often called high dosage tutoring, it has to happen a lot with a lot of regularity. And the other piece that's different frankly, is where it's really closely aligned. There was actually a really interesting study that happened in Tennessee. Tennessee has a pretty big statewide RTI, response to intervention program, for students scoring in the 20th percentile or lower. And so a nonprofit in Tennessee called Tennessee SCORE was curious about what's the difference between the academic interventions that students who qualified for these RTI programs were getting compared to high-impact tutoring that's aligned to the curriculum?

And so, they worked with four districts to run a pilot where some of the students who fell into that RTI category did the state approved RTI program or district approved RTI program, and some of them did high-impact tutoring aligned to their school's curriculum. And the results were that the students who were doing the high-impact tutoring aligned to their school's curriculum gain significantly more learning than the students who are doing a separate standalone RTI, you are just a low performing student, here are some baseline skills. And so, one of the real takeaways is that what students need and what high-impact tutoring can give them when done well is additional academic support very closely tied to what they're doing in the classroom the rest of the day.

JILL ANDERSON: Well, I was going to ask you if you saw that there were particular subjects, grade levels or even student populations where this was especially impactful?

LIZ COHEN: First of all, I want to just take a step back and say we have a lot of evidence that tutoring can be impactful and implementation is really hard. And so the reason you have varying levels of impact, you can have a lot of different reasons, but I think that while we've seen high-impact tutoring tried in almost every grade level and many, many subjects, I've seen tutoring used for students who need to pass high school exit exams, seen it for ninth grade algebra, all through K-8. But the most common places we've really seen this response used is in early literacy and particularly in the states who have really committed to a science of reading approach. So if you look at states like Tennessee, like Louisiana, they really leaned into incorporating high-impact tutoring during the school day in their K-3 grades as part of their overall overhaul of what it means to try to improve how we teach young kids how to read.

JILL ANDERSON: One of the things I thought was really interesting is looking at some of the differences between district led tutoring initiatives versus some of the state led tutoring initiatives where, as I understand it, the results have been slightly mixed. What can you tell us about that and why we saw mixed results at the state level?

LIZ COHEN: It's a funny question because of course I work right now at an organization that is dedicated to state level policy, and I, myself, have worked at both the state and district level. So, I have worked on both sides of this. And I think that there's different reasons. First of all, states and districts have different levers that they can hold in terms of leadership and in terms of implementation. And so, I think one of the challenges for state level programming is if districts aren't committed to the implementation part of it, and frankly if the funding isn't there, to make sure that the implementation can be seen through.

So, in places where the states said, "Well, we're just going to give some grants, but we're not going to pay attention, we're not going to hold close to guardrails, we're just going to hope everybody does the right thing", then we didn't see as great results. But right now, in the fall of 2025 in Louisiana, they're tutoring something like 260,000 students in the school day in Louisiana. And a lot of that is a state-led effort with state money, but the districts are really bought into the implementation of it because there was sufficient funding because there's also funding for things like coaches for teachers and there's a lot of awareness about the benefits of tutoring and the districts where tutoring has really been successful, which is places like Guilford County, North Carolina, Baltimore City, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Ector County, Texas, there's other places too.

But that was really where there was significant executive leadership saying tutoring is a key part of our strategy to improve student outcomes and this is how we're going to do it. And again, providing the implementation support. So, in Ector County, they actually had a woman whose full-time job for three years was the district high-impact tutoring manager, which meant she went to all the schools regularly, talked to all the principals. Was in some cases literally showing up to schools, making sure are these kids where they need to be for their tutoring sessions? Really hand-holding in ways that we know that schools need, especially in times of disruption and chaos in those initial pandemic years. So, I think just districts are more naturally positioned and the state programs suffer if they're not willing to give the districts the resources and support they need to do that level of implementation.

JILL ANDERSON: Right. So, in some ways it's almost you need to have the professional support on the ground to make sure that this is a successful initiative.

LIZ COHEN: Yeah. Look, the best way to do it is to build on how the best things always work, which is to find your champions. Districts like to know what other districts are doing, who they look up to or who look like them. And so, one of the wonderful things about tutoring is it's actually very popular. Principals like tutoring, teachers like tutoring, parents like tutoring. And so, if you find districts where the tutoring is going well, if you can use that as a model to help your other districts figure out what it is they need to do, but the state has to really be committed to supporting on the implementation part of it as well as providing the funding.

JILL ANDERSON: Is that what really maintains the high-impact factor here, making sure it goes as planned when you're trying to scale something like this, or are there other things that schools really need to do to maintain that high-impact standard as these programs grow?

LIZ COHEN: Yeah, when you look at the data of the programs that are getting better results than others, actually the dosage is one of the biggest differences. And by that, I mean that students are actually getting the number of tutoring sessions that the evidence suggests that they need. And so if you don't pay attention to implementation or you haven't really thought that through, then what happens is whether it's because of chronic absenteeism or whether it's because there's just a lack of total commitment within the school building to make sure the tutoring sessions are happening or you didn't choose the right vendor tutoring provider partner, there's a lot of different ways to do it, but if kids aren't actually getting the number of sessions they need, they're not getting those three or four sessions... I remember sitting with a classroom teacher in a charter school in the District of Columbia that was doing just this one grade level tutoring program, and she was looking at her results from a test.

She had written her own math test for these fifth graders, gave them at the beginning of the tutoring and at the end, and I sat with her while she was looking at the results at the end, and she was feeling disappointed. She said, "Some of these students, I really thought that they would do better on this test because I've seen the tutoring sessions and I thought it was going really well." And I said to her, "Well, for some of these students who didn't perform as well as you thought after 10 weeks of tutoring, how often were they in school? How many of the tutoring sessions did they attend?" And when she started adding in the attendance and she saw that this one girl, in particular, I remember that she was disappointed by, but it turns out that child only attended 60% of her scheduled tutoring sessions because she just wasn't in school.

The dosage of it is the thing that actually matters, and it's the hardest part. But elementary schools, which is where a lot of the tutoring has been and where a lot of it remains, the schools that are doing the best are ones that have done things like rearrange their school schedules to create a tutoring block or an intervention block, which is a dedicated period in the day in which every student either in the grade or in some cases in the whole school are during that time participating in either tutoring or some other small group academic activity. And so that really builds in that time to make sure that the tutoring can happen regularly and is part of the whole school culture.

JILL ANDERSON: I want to know more about how schools are identifying the students who need the high dose tutoring.

LIZ COHEN: So again, there's a lot of different ways that schools are thinking about this. And one of the benefits of the schools that really chose to use their one-time ESSER federal funds on tutoring was that they were actually able to provide tutoring in some cases to all the students. And so actually one of the interesting things I learned is that in Ector County, which is in West Texas, in Odessa, Texas, when some of the schools in Ector County started implementing tutoring, they were doing what you might guess schools would do. Identifying some portion of the kids who are performing the least well and saying "You're going to do tutoring." And what the schools realized pretty quickly was that it wasn't going very well for two reasons. One, they're trying to keep the rest of the class busy or quiet while some kids were getting tutoring.

And two is that they created a stigma about who was getting the tutoring. And so, what they were able to do because there were these funds available, was actually to say, "We're going to give tutoring to everybody because everybody can practice, can learn, can advance wherever you are on the scale." And as soon as they let everybody do tutoring during that block, it changed the whole feeling around tutoring and the kids started buying into the experience and it worked on all ends. The lower performing kids were actually growing quite a bit, but I also talked to a fifth-grade math teacher who said, "Every year I have a couple students who are ready to start doing sixth grade level math. And I've always been nervous to let them move ahead because how would they do on the fifth-grade state test and how do I balance helping them move ahead with everything else?

"But they got to move ahead in the tutoring. And what I learned from that as a teacher", this man told me, "Is that I can let students do what they need to do and proceed as they're ready to and they're still going to be okay." But the tutoring let everybody get that individual attention and progress, whether you're at the bottom end of the spectrum or the top end of the spectrum. And it made it, so all the kids liked the tutoring, but in today's more resource-strapped environment, we don't have as many examples of that able to continue. So, in most cases, it depends. One pretty common approach in a lot of places is to identify kids who are six months to a year maybe behind grade level. So, what some people might call tier two level kids, like you're not quite on grade level, but you're not so far behind.

Those are the kids that many schools are targeting for this kind of tutoring because with the small group nature of it, and these are typically kids that don't have other disabilities, it's enough to start getting them closer back up to grade level. And in some cases, it's also because during these tutoring blocks, it means the classroom teachers can actually work with some of the lowest performing kids, and they want to do that in many cases. They want to build that relationship, they see what those kids need, and so they're the ones working with the lowest performing kids often while the tutors are working with that middle tier.

JILL ANDERSON: How about finding the people to do the work as tutors? Has that been a challenge in some places?

LIZ COHEN: I am so glad you asked because one of the coolest things about tutoring that we have learned in the last five years is that actually almost anyone can be a really highly effective tutor. And we know that because we've seen it. Districts have hired everyone from current teachers, retired teachers, stay-at-home moms, college students, high school students, young adults out of college, you name it, people have worked as tutors and gotten meaningful results. And part of that is because again, if you go back to that standard of what high-impact tutoring is, if you have aligned materials and regular sessions with an adult, and especially we're often talking, remember, about early literacy and early math. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, they ran a program where high school students could both get credit and get paid to walk down the street to their neighborhood elementary school, which in the one case I know is literally down the hill to the elementary school and to tutor.

And I talked to a young woman who was actually going to be graduating a year early from high school, had been working all year as a tutor in the elementary school where she had attended, and then she was now going to be the first person in her college to go to college at the University of Tennessee, and she's studying to be a teacher now in part because she had the opportunity to start working in classrooms as a tutor in high school. And that's just one example, but we're seeing a lot of that, and college students in particular are a very rich area field to find willing tutors in part because another key part of what we've learned in the last few years is that you can actually do a lot of effective tutoring virtually. It doesn't have to be in person to get the benefits, which is surprising to a lot of people because they all remember when we did virtual schooling in the pandemic and it was a disaster.

But it turns out that you can build a relationship with one tutor and maybe two students, sometimes three students online. And so there's lots of programs, Teach for America launched a tutoring program that has now tutored thousands of students with hundreds of college students where the college students get paid $1,200 for a 10-week tutoring commitment of about 40 minutes a day with some training, and they can pick where they want to tutor based on their schedule for that semester. So, if I can see my classes, and I know that where I'm free happens to be 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM, and then I can see, oh, this school in Louisiana needs tutors in that time, or this school in Georgia needs tutors. And then it's via Zoom with trained college students supported by an in-school person who also receives a stipend through the TFA program to help monitor and manage and support the college tutors. And that program has been wildly successful.

JILL ANDERSON: It's interesting that they're able to find people to do this.

LIZ COHEN: Yeah, look, college students like jobs, is part of it.

JILL ANDERSON: Yeah.

LIZ COHEN: Right? And then one of the nice things we're learning is that it looks like it's also starting to create some pipeline to teachers. Quite a few actually of the Teach for America core members. For example, this year and last year, I know last year over 8% of first year Teach for America teachers had first worked as tutors while they were college students in that Teach for America program. And so, we're seeing that in other places too. And in fact, the ed schools have also started getting involved in how do we capitalize on using tutoring not just to help people maybe want to consider teaching as a profession, but actually for those who already know for our education majors.

So, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, which is the largest teacher prep program in Ohio, their ed school decided after starting to do some tutoring in 2021 immediately after the pandemic. And they realized, wow, if our future teachers can really understand what it takes to help Jill learn how to read this paragraph, to help Jill master these few facts, that's actually a skill that's going to come in really handy when they have a whole classroom. Bowling Green State has now reworked their entire education curriculum for their education majors so that every student spends at least a semester working in a local school high-impact tutoring as part of the curriculum because they are so bought into the idea that working as a tutor is actually a key part of preparing to become a teacher.

JILL ANDERSON: Enlighten me a little bit because I want to understand more about when this doesn't work because it feels, talking to you, like this is a no-brainer, like every school district should be doing this. We often hear about the recent NAEP scores and hearing about it, and it seems like high-impact tutoring has been very promising and especially for reading, but clearly there are places where this has not worked and what has gone wrong in those cases?

LIZ COHEN: The biggest example of where tutoring doesn't work is when instead of trying to do the hard thing well, which is high-impact tutoring, where most often it's been states have instead contracted with on-demand tutoring companies, which is a way of saying, we're going to provide every student in the state with access, if you need help with something, if you're struggling, you can go online and you can ask for help. And those programs just don't work because students don't really use them. The students who do use them aren't the ones who we might want to make sure are in fact using them. So on-demand tutoring is an easy case of where tutoring doesn't work out, but there are also cases of expensive high-impact tutoring programs where the results aren't great and often that has to do, again, back to this idea of the dosage and the implementation.

So are they really getting the sessions? What are they doing during those sessions? Are the curriculum aligned? So an example of where this just gets messy, right? It's tricky and there's lots of humans involved, and that means it's often not clear-cut, is the work that's happened in Nashville. So Nashville made a big district-wide commitment to tutoring, and then some researchers led by Matt Kraft at Brown University wrote an initial paper on the first year of results of this big tutoring initiative where they had followed all the gold standard and done all the things, and Matt and others concluded, the research found that there really wasn't any effect on reading or math scores. And so on the one hand, this was pretty disheartening, and a lot of people said, "See? Tutoring at scale doesn't work." I called up this woman, Sarah Chin, who helps oversee some of the tutoring work in Nashville, and her take on it was we're trying to tutor 10,000 students, and this was our first year of doing it.

So we are in schools every day, and we are seeing daily that more and more students are attending the sessions, that schools are buying into the potential of tutoring, and we think that it takes more than a year to get this right, and so we're not giving up, we're going to continue the work and continue refining how we implement. And so, we're waiting now to see how this next year or so of data looks for Nashville. So, I think that is also where just in the real world implementation at scale is hard, and it doesn't always take a year if you're trying to do it really big. So, the other lesson is you're not always going to get the results you want right away and whether or not you're willing to stick with it and continue the investment of time and resources and money, it depends in part on the vision, and also obviously competing priorities and other political headwinds too. So, it gets a little tricky.

JILL ANDERSON: Is there a price tag for this that you can give me? I know it might be hard because it probably matters where you are, how many students you have.

LIZ COHEN: I could throw out some numbers with a caveat that the numbers are changing a lot because you could tutor a kid over a year, which is usually two 10-week sessions for probably something like $1,400, $1,500, which is maybe not that much if you're just really trying to get a kid back up to grade level. And if your state-per-pupil is something like... And you're paying for it for state funds, your state-per-pupil is like $8,000, then it's a big percentage of it. Okay. We spend a lot of money on a lot of things in education, so I wouldn't scare away by the price tag, but I think $1,500 per student is roughly. Now, there are some programs that are much more expensive than that. A Chicago program called Saga, when that was implemented in these Chicago public school high schools with ninth graders every day in this very small group, so that was an expensive program.

That implementation during the randomized controlled trial was like $3,000 a student, and no one, not even Saga is not pretending that's going to be sustainable at scale. They've done a lot of work themselves as an organization to figure out, what can we do? One of the interesting things that the Saga folks realized is that they did a second trial where they said, "Well, what happens if instead of working with the human tutors five days a week, we work with the human tutors three days a week and the other two days during those session times, the students are doing some computer assisted learning?" Like adaptive learning, targeted to the same material they would be covering. And actually they did another RCT on that approach and they got almost the same results. So that was really exciting because it means you could actually spend a little bit less on tutoring, replace some of it with a very specific aligned tech engaged experience and get the same results.
This is usually the point in the conversation where someone says, "But AI is going to make this super affordable and cheap, and then everyone can have a tutor," in case you were thinking of asking that. I'll just go ahead and say, I think maybe, but also not yet is where I'm at with that answer. What I believe is the most powerful part of the story of the high-impact tutoring movement and the tutoring movement at large that's happened in the last five years in America is that it's a human centered story that is in part empowered by tech, right? Because a lot of it's happening virtually. There's a lot of really interesting research and opportunities that tech is allowing for, but this is fundamentally a story about humans, and it's a story about the fact that young people in America are very hungry for meaningful relationships with adults, and those can be young adults in high school and college, or they can be older adults too.

Another piece is that are there any benefits to tutoring besides academics? To which I would say yes, there's research emerging that shows that students engaged in high-impact tutoring have better school attendance rates, and every classroom and school I visited has said that their students are more engaged in learning, they're more engaged in school, they feel more connected to their identity as a student and their learning. And so, some of this is relationship-driven, and that relationship can be enhanced by technology, and in some cases technology will allow us to become more efficient. So, one of the big places people are playing with AI is how do we use AI to coach tutors to do a better job? And so that's an interesting idea. If you and I are tutoring virtually and I'm your tutor, and I say to you like, "Okay, Jill, do this math problem for me."

People are building cool AI tools that'll pop up on my screen and say, "Here's the next question you should ask Liz. If Jill says X, you say Y. If Jill says B, you say C." That's really useful stuff, and some of the research on that is showing that it can make a really big difference. There was a study done on an AI tutor coach on a program that showed that it basically took away the entire learning curve of how to learn how to be a tutor. So there are a lot of interesting lessons from tech on that, and I think AI tutoring is part of the future, and I want to say that right now, especially coming out of the pandemic where isolation was so much part of the story and a deconnection from systems and schools and institutions, that I believe that part of the strength of tutoring and why it's caught on is because it was about a human reconnection, and that rebuilding of relationships around learning.

JILL ANDERSON: From a policy perspective, this Educational Choice for Children Act is offering family scholarships to pay for tutoring. In your view, should states see this as a tool to improve learning outcomes broadly, or does tutoring really only succeed when it's shared with very particular practices and structures?

LIZ COHEN: So, if you look at polling of parents, parents love tutoring and parents want tutoring. At 50CAN, we did a nationally representative survey of 20,000 parents last year across the United States, and we asked them about whether their children are getting tutoring, whether they would want tutoring for their child, and the reality is that people want tutoring. Something like 40% of parents who make more than half a million dollars are paying for tutoring outside of school. So, it's also an equity issue because you're never going to close an achievement gap if the top keeps paying for more tutoring.

JILL ANDERSON: Right.

LIZ COHEN: So how do we get more tutoring to everyone? It's also the parents whose kids are doing the worst in school are the ones who say they want tutoring, but they either can't afford it or don't know how to get it. So, the kids getting tutoring are on average getting Bs and Cs, their parents reported, the parents who want tutoring, their kids are getting Ds and Fs.
The point is parents want tutoring. It polls incredibly well. A poll in Louisiana is like 97% of parents and public voters at large support tutoring. So, if your question is do people want tutoring and should we use all possible means to help them get more tutoring? I would say yes. There's lots of different kinds of tutoring that people want, especially if you think about the private tutoring market and accessing that outside of school and depending on what your child's needs are and the kind of support you want to get for them, and it can look very different, personally. I have three kids, last year paid for a former teacher from my kid's school to do some one-off geometry tutoring with my older son who needed some extra help in geometry. I'm right now paying for a French tutor because they don't offer French at my daughter's school, but she wants to do it in high school, so we're trying to get her into French 2 when she goes to high school.

So, there's that kind of tutoring, right? And then there's the Kumon and Huntington Center, all these kinds of after-school programs, all to say people want tutoring for their kids, they want it, so I don't know why we wouldn't do it. The thing with ECA in particular is it's donation-based, so people have to donate money. That's where the money comes from. I would argue that if you have people who are willing to donate $1,700, which is the max donation in your state, then you might as well create some kind of scholarship granting organization that's the vehicle that allows you guys to take in that money and then use it. I would argue for tutoring, because obviously that's the thing I care a lot about, but use it for whatever you want. Otherwise, people are going to donate that money out-of-state.

And so, if you're in a blue state and people want to give money, why do you want them to give that money to a scholarship granting organization in Georgia or Louisiana when they could give it somewhere in Massachusetts or New Jersey and it could go to fund tutoring that everybody wants? And then the state scholarship granting organization can make decisions and say, "Well, we're going to grant to people who..." You can make it means tested. You can do it however you want. I would argue that I think that providing access to tutoring right now is one of the biggest equity issues that we have in education. So, if there's a way to help support more families accessing it, it seems worthwhile. And Denver, by the way, has been playing with this.

The city of Denver did a private-public partnership with the city of Denver and a local foundation, and they created a program called My Spark, which gave 5,000 families of middle school students a $1,000 scholarship or voucher, whatever you want to call it, to pay for after-school activities with the understanding that affluent families are paying for sports, they're paying for violin lessons, they're paying for tutoring. And so, My Spark gave low-income families in Denver $1,000 and said, "You can use this at all of these different after-school things." And so some families have used it for tutoring, some have used it for violin lessons, some have used it for travel soccer teams. The things that I take for granted of being able to provide for my kids that other families are watching their kids not be able to have. So, I think you can look at the success of the My Spark program, which has gone really well in Denver and has really empowered families to feel like they can give their kids a more well-rounded childhood, and tutoring is a part of that.

JILL ANDERSON: Well, knowing that this high-impact tutoring is still very early in education, what innovations and research in tutoring are you most excited about in the future?

LIZ COHEN: Look, I am actively watching the development of some of the spoken AI tutor work, and I am really intrigued about what role I think that might play in the future. I do think that in the next five years, we're going to have pretty high quality spoken AI tutors that can probably serve as a first cut that for some kids will be enough, and for some kids it won't. I remain very interested in trying to get more ed schools on board with the idea of matchmaking teacher prep with tutoring. We usually have something like 3 to 500,000 individuals enrolled in an education school in any given year. So if we were able to create a world in which even half of those, let's say 250,000 individuals were going to be working as part of their education as a tutor every single year, that would help build a really strong tutoring workforce that I think would also set those individuals up for future success professionally as well in education and would help provide more lower cost tutors to schools. So, I am really watching to see who wants to continue leading and pushing on those opportunities as well.

The other piece is just, this one might be a pie in the sky, I don't know that this is happening yet, but this is what I want. I want people to start thinking about what have we learned from tutoring that can make us think differently about what else we could do different in education? For instance, time in the school day. So, we moved to increasing the amount of required time. For instance, usually most places like 90 minutes for English and 90 minutes for math because we were like, "Oh, kids aren't getting enough academics. They need to do more academics." I wonder if there's an opportunity, especially if you've built in a really high quality tutoring program, to rethink some of how we use time in the school day, give back more time for recess, for PE, for the arts, for these pieces that we know kids actually also need for development and for healthy bodies because we're using our academic time more deeply and more efficiently and more effectively if you've incorporated really great tutoring. That's the big picture thinking that I'm also looking for.

JILL ANDERSON: Well, there's so much to think about with this, and it's really going to be something to watch over the next many years how this unfolds. Thank you so much, Liz.

LIZ COHEN: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

JILL ANDERSON: Liz Cohen is the vice president of policy at 50CAN, a national nonprofit education advocacy organization. She's the author of “The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives.” I'm Jill Anderson, this is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.