A Path to Student Success Is Already Illuminated

High-impact tutoring started as a strategy for recovery and is now a leading intervention helping thousands of DC students get further, faster.

By Cat Peretti, Executive Director, CityTutorDC

It was March 2024, at the first High-Impact Tutoring Summit, when DC’s Mayor Bowser announced a District-wide local investment in high-impact tutoring. At a time when many recovery investments were sunsetting, this decision demonstrated the District’s confidence that HIT was working. At this year’s summit, co-hosted with the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), 200 educators, providers, policymakers, and school and systems leaders reconvened to build on and celebrate the success we’ve seen over the past year:  DC students are outpacing the nation in math and reading recovery, students receiving high-impact tutoring saw a 7% drop in absenteeism on tutoring days, and economically disadvantaged students who receive tutoring grow faster than their peers—proving the intentional investments in targeted interventions are paying off.

“It’s interesting,” says Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate and keynote speaker at the HIT Summit as he commented on the Nation’s Report Card. “The places that have the most focus on academic intervention and the most focus on helping kids catch up are also the places that have the most systematized approach to high-dosage tutoring and are using tutoring as a key part of their toolkit.”

Every panel was designed to deepen DC educators’ toolkits. Whether to Maximize Impact, Strengthen DC’s Teacher Pipeline, or Pay For (H)It, breakouts zeroed in on continuous improvement and sustainability for HIT in schools. Despite the uncertain roads ahead, we’re still hitting the gas as we navigate. Investment and innovation are working, but there are students still catching up, proficiency remains too low, and deep racial and economic gaps in achievement persist.

What’s HIT
Trained and trusted adults provide consistent, personalized—one-on-one or small-group—support in math or literacy for 90 minutes a week meeting multiple times. That’s high-impact tutoring in one sentence. 

While private tutoring has surged in largely affluent communities, public schools are doing more with less. Families with limited means to pay are then left without access to education to support their students’ needs. HIT investment helps level the playing field. We believe DC’s public education system can be the first where zipcode and income do not determine whether a student succeeds. To get there, we’re expanding the universe of trained, trusted adults paying attention to our students’ needs. And as a result, students feel seen, valued, and connected to their learning, so they’re attending more consistently and seeing their accelerated academic growth.

A proof point for math

CityTutor DC’s  research partner, EmpowerK12, recently studied the impact of high-dosage tutoring on student academic growth in math. Using a matched-comparison method, they compared the 2024-25 school year results of over 1,100 students who had baseline math test scores below the national average and then received more than 900 minutes of tutoring in grades K-8 against similar non-tutored peer students. [1] When you get into the details of their recent analysis, you see tremendous results:

• Tutored students in math showed academic gains (+0.29 standard deviations), equivalent to 2 months of additional learning.*

• Students who received full dosage of more than 900 minutes of tutoring (at least 90 minutes/week) meeting multiple times for at least ten weeks, exceeded expected growth by 44%.*

• Economically disadvantaged students receiving high dosage tutoring saw larger math growth rates.*

* compared to non-tutored peers.

High-impact tutoring is working and it needs continued support–as advocated for by the DC Students Succeed Coalition.

In a variety of contexts, we consistently find our implementation of evidence-based tutoring is effective for accelerating academic growth. Well-designed, intensive tutoring programs like HIT are powerful ways to accelerate learning, address performance gaps, and get students further, faster. And we know this to be the case, because we see it in classrooms across DC every day. That’s why we continue to improve, scale and grow HIT to get every student the excellent education they deserve.