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There are more than 12 million elementary and middle school students from low-income families who are below grade level in reading or math, our analysis shows. Yet school districts across the country are cutting their tutoring programs — not because they doubt the evidence, but because they can’t afford the tutors.
Traditional high-impact tutoring can cost upward of $2,000 per student a year, and staffing is the single biggest constraint. At the same time, shortages of qualified teachers persist, with districts struggling to recruit and retain the educators students need most.
These two crises, a tutoring access gap and a teacher pipeline shortage, are usually treated as separate problems, but they shouldn’t be. Among the full landscape of education interventions, high-impact tutoring is one of the most consistently effective, evidence-based strategies for accelerating student learning. The results are replicable, offering up a solution to both crises that is currently hiding in plain sight.
Each year, more than 600,000 aspiring teachers are enrolled in educator-preparation programs across the country. Another 600,000 college students are employed through Federal Work-Study as well as state programs, such as Californians for All College Corps. We can, and must, activate these people as tutors for the students who need them most. To do that, policymakers should act on two fronts.
First, unlock Federal Work-Study dollars for tutoring. The infrastructure already exists. Work-Study employs 600,000 college students annually in federally subsidized campus jobs. Redirecting even a fraction of these positions toward high-quality tutoring would create one of the largest, most cost-effective tutoring workforces in the country without requiring new appropriations.
This is already happening. Step Up Tutoring engages college students paid through Federal Work-Study or College Corps at 40 colleges and universities across 15 states, making it one of the fastest-growing Work-Study–powered tutoring programs in the country. Step Up delivers one-on-one virtual tutoring and mentorship to over 5,000 underserved students annually in more than 40 districts across four states. Its students are outperforming peers by wide margins; an independent evaluation found that students receiving tutoring with Step Up gained two to four additional months of learning in math compared to a control group.
Critically, this model both expands the tutoring workforce and strengthens the educator pipeline. This year, 73% of Step Up’s college and high school-aged tutors reported that they are somewhat to strongly interested in pursuing a career in education, and 82% said their Step Up experience increased that interest. As one tutor shared: “Step Up confirmed my desire to go into teaching. I wasn’t sure before, but working with my student has been the most fulfilling part of my week.”
Second, require tutoring experience as a core component of teacher preparation. Many aspiring teachers enrolled in prep programs don’t have an opportunity to regularly practice what they learn until a culminating student teaching experience or a year-long residency near the end of their program. Tutoring can be the lab where theory meets practice earlier in their preparation, allowing candidates to begin working directly with students to practice instructional skills and identify and use high-quality instructional materials in real time.
Deans for Impact’s partnerships with nearly 300 prep programs demonstrate that aspiring teachers grow more skilled, confident and effective when they have structured opportunities to engage in on-the-job learning early and often. Through a pilot designed to prepare aspiring-teacher tutors to identify and effectively use high quality materials, results showed that there was an average 20-plus percentage-point growth in instructional skills and knowledge among participants. Findings also showed an average overall increase of over 49% in tutors’ feelings of preparedness to teach.
When tutoring is embedded into preparation, and not treated as an add-on, aspiring educators build instructional skills earlier, with support, before stepping into the complexity of full-classroom teaching. Districts gain a steadier, stronger pipeline. And states produce teachers who know how to accelerate learning from day one.
COVID Relief Funds are Gone, But More States Commit to High-Impact Tutoring
There is another reason to be optimistic about the effectiveness of these novice tutors. Increasingly, AI-powered tools can provide real-time instructional guidance, helping tutors decide what to teach, how to explain concepts and how to respond when students struggle. This is not about replacing the human relationship at the center of effective tutoring; it is about ensuring that every willing tutor, regardless of prior experience, can deliver consistent, high-quality instruction.
If we act on these two priorities — unlocking Work-Study funding and embedding tutoring in teacher preparation — we can solve two critical problems at once. Students gain the academic support and human relationships they desperately need. And more young adults can build their confidence and skills in teaching from the start. In the process, they establish a habit of service that will shape the rest of their careers.
Despite the sunset of ESSER funds, the federal government has continued to foster momentum by elevating tutoring as a priority in existing and future grant competitions. In December 2025, the U.S. Department of Education awarded $256 million via the Education Innovation and Research grant to scale tutoring and improve literacy. Also in December, a growing bipartisan, bicameral coalition of Congressional leaders re-introduced the PATHS to Tutor Act to scale local partnerships working to embed tutoring into teacher training.
But the next step must be bolder: we need a comprehensive, national strategy that integrates tutoring into the fabric of teacher preparation and channels federal dollars toward improving academic outcomes while simultaneously cultivating the next generation of educators.
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