New study suggests Metro Nashville tutoring program was less impactful than expected

Stock photo of student taking a test

Despite increased investments in academic support to combat “learning loss” that came as a result of COVID-19, a recent report from Brown University researchers suggests students in Metro Nashville Public Schools are not benefitting much from tutoring.

According to the report, which calculated the academic progress of about 7,000 students in the district who received tutoring from 2021 to 2023, investments in tutoring only marginally boosted test scores in reading and produced no improvements in math. The study was conducted by a research team led by Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown who was recently selected to serve as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers to help advise the Biden administration on how to improve the economy and education systems.

The report noted that the district increased its number of tutors for its Accelerating Scholars tutoring program by “pivoting from a volunteer to a teacher-based staffing model” and addressing scheduling constraints by offering tutoring immediately before and after school in addition to the school day to support student’s academic recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It added that the district steadily scaled the program across two years, delivering over 125,000 total hours of tutoring to more than 6,800 students.

While those efforts to expand tutoring marked a “major accomplishment” for the district, the report noted that the tutoring failed to improve life course grades in math or reading.

“These results are not as large as many in the education sector had hoped,” Kraft said of the study’s findings in the Hechinger Report.

According to the report, time is likely one of the factors that explain how tutoring was less helpful than expected in the district.

“The majority of students participated in one semester of tutoring with a targeted dosage of 15 total hours in 2021-22 (1.5 hours over 10 weeks) and 18 hours in 2022-23 (1.5 hours over 12 weeks). While Accelerating Scholars was successful at delivering much of this intended dosage, the focus on one-semester of tutoring during the scale-up period caused the total annual dosage to be notably less than other tutoring programs, on average,” the report read.

Another explanation noted by the report is the fact that the Accelerating Scholars model of standards-based tutoring was only effective at raising test scores among students in the middle of performance distribution. It said the “most sizable effects in reading are concentrated in the 40th to the 60th percentiles of the performance distribution, and all positive effects are in the 50th to the 70th percentile range for math.”

The report said the Accelerating Scholars program could have a larger impact if educators can “better target students who most benefit from the standards-based model of tutoring,” among other recommendations.

“MNPS designed the program as a supplemental source of personalized instruction in core grade-level content. This universal approach to tutoring followed a set curricula likely designed for the average student, in contrast to tutoring models that personalize the content of instruction based on diagnostic assessments of students’ individual learning needs,” the report read. “Important challenges remain for delivering tutoring at scale that is both impactful and cost-effective.”