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My daughter is struggling in seventh grade pre-algebra and one reason is the foundational math she never truly mastered during 2020-2021’s virtual learning. To help her, I am doing the obvious thing: looking into afterschool tutoring.
It turns out, of course, that I am far from alone.
Participation in tutoring grew by five percentage points (from 19% to 24%) between 2024 and 2025, according to the newly released 2nd Edition of The State of Educational Opportunity in America: A Survey of 23,000 Parents, from 50CAN and Edge Research. In the notoriously slow-moving U.S. education system, this is a sea-change. In urban areas, the rates are still higher, with nearly one-third of parents reporting that their child attends tutoring.
Tutoring has long been the primary academic response of wealthy families across the United States when their children need additional support. Yet, the survey found that this too is shifting. While tutoring among high-income families increased one point from 28% to 29%, among low-income families there was a five-point increase, cutting the access gap between low- and high-income families substantially. Indeed, at this point, you’d be hard pressed to go into any school, public or private, and not find children who attend academic tutoring outside of school. Tutoring is becoming the go-to tool for parents at all income levels and across all demographic groups.
What would it take to make tutoring truly universal? The main barrier is expense, with 30% of parents whose children are not in tutoring saying that it’s too expensive. Cost is likely also the reason that students in private school participate in tutoring at much higher rates than their peers in public schools. A second barrier to tutoring is access. For the students getting the worst grades, 26%of parents also said that tutoring is not available in their community.
Parents Want Tutoring, Summer Camp, Open Enrollment. Annual Testing? Not So Much
My daughter is fortunate: I have the means to pay for tutoring, and I live in a suburban community with numerous tutoring centers. Like me, D.C. Public Schools principal Katreena Shelby had turned to private math tutoring when her daughter needed help. After seeing how quickly her daughter got back on track, she started wondering if she could get this same kind of help for her public middle school students. “I had the means to pay for my daughter to get tutoring,” Shelby told me. “Yet I wasn’t prioritizing the budget I had control over to get my students this same kind of support.” Shelby is one of thousands of principals who, in the wake of the pandemic, embraced tutoring.
Spending two years researching the emergence of this new wave of high-impact tutoring for my book The Future of Tutoring, I’ve seen firsthand how students, teachers, school leaders and parents alike get excited when they are able to provide personalized support to struggling students. Tutoring is endlessly flexible; successful tutoring has taken place for early literacy in kindergarten, fourth-grade math skills, middle grades reading, ninth-grade Algebra I, required high school exit exams and more. Public schools have found ways to provide the very service that so many parents seek outside of school — a trusted adult who regularly meets with a small group of children, understands the progress they need to make and builds a relationship with them to not only help them learn but help them want to learn.
While the initial groundswell of high-impact tutoring fueled by federal COVID dollars has dissipated, there are states and districts continuing to provide publicly-funded tutoring. Cities like Nashville and the District of Columbia are staying the course with tutoring programs that launched in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, while other cities like Philadelphia are trying to get new tutoring efforts off the ground now.
Louisiana has led the way for states, with state budget investments of $30 million annually to support tutoring for students below grade-level that is now required by legislation. Massachusetts is in the first year of implementing early literacy tutoring for struggling students in grades K-3, funded by a $25 million annual state budget allocation. Ohio’s state Senate passed Senate Bill 19 at the end of 2025, which, if enacted, will require high-impact tutoring for students performing below grade-level in math.
The Post-Pandemic Promise of High-Impact Tutoring
The good news from the State of Educational Opportunity survey is that a majority of parents strongly favor public funding that provides access to free tutoring for K-12 students who fall below grade level. In fact, of the nine policy proposals that parents were asked about in the survey, public funding for tutoring ranked first with 86% of parents supporting the idea.
Tutoring is equally popular on both sides of the aisle, the survey reveals, and that popularity holds in every single state across the country. From a low of 79% support in Vermont to a high of 92% support in D.C., it’s clear that parents across the country want every child who needs help to receive that help, paid for by public dollars.
In a country that seems increasingly pitted against itself, tutoring is one of the last remaining policies that has a chance to pull us back together. Parents in rural, urban, red, blue, east and west America know their child’s future rests on a quality education. What we learn from this new survey is that more than three-quarters of parents in every state want this for every child, not only their own. It is time that policymakers take up this charge from their voters and make 2026 the year that tutoring becomes a permanent part of the American educational experience.
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