Bright Spots
Unlocking Evidence
As a former district leader, I know how important it is to have rigorous evidence on the impact of interventions like high-impact tutoring. We must also understand how to lower costs and make tutoring scalable so more students can benefit. The Personalized Learning Initiative focuses on understanding not just whether tutoring works, but whether different types of lower-cost tutoring can still be impactful in certain contexts.—Dr. Sadie Stockdale Jefferson, Executive Director, The University of Chicago Education Lab
The Problem
Despite massive federal, state, and local investments to address pandemic-induced learning loss in U.S. schools, as of January 2024 researchers estimated that students still needed to recoup about two-thirds of their learning in math and three-quarters of their learning in reading to return to pre-pandemic levels.
The Evidence
Multiple rigorous studies have found that high-impact tutoring—defined as students spending substantial time each week receiving targeted curriculum-aligned instruction while building strong tutor-student relationships—has sizable, positive impacts on student achievement. Guided by this evidence, districts and states have invested heavily in scaling tutoring programs to support student learning, with $700 million in federal American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds spent on tutoring over the last three years. As districts spend their final ARP dollars and the education sector enters a tightened fiscal climate, our Foundation has invested in rigorous research to identify the best strategies to make tutoring programs less costly and more scalable—while maintaining impact.
Since 2018, we’ve invested in rigorous research to help scale proven tutoring models, while evaluating opportunities to make those models more cost-effective. Alongside Arnold Ventures, we funded a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Saga Education’s hybrid tutoring approach to better understand whether hybrid tutoring can be impactful while lowering costs. The study, led by the University of Chicago, examined Saga’s newer hybrid model in which two students received in-person tutoring while two other students worked on aligned independent computer-assisted learning, alternating every other day. Researchers compared math achievement for students randomly assigned to hybrid tutoring versus those who continued with business-as-usual instruction, with reported impacts of approximately 0.23 SDs, or about a year of learning, on math achievement for participating ninth graders. At around $2,250 per student (in 2018-19 dollars), this less expensive model highlighted the potential of hybrid tutoring to maintain impacts while lowering costs, more cost-effectively supporting learning recovery and acceleration for districts.
We’ve also funded studies to answer questions about the efficacy of virtual tutoring and effective dosage recommendations through our support of Accelerate, which aims to identify proven, affordable, and scalable tutoring providers and invest in program implementation and rigorous evaluation. Since the organization was founded in 2022, it has launched more than 25 evaluations of high-quality tutoring programs, such as an RCT led by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, which demonstrated substantive positive impacts of the virtual tutoring model Air Reading on first through sixth grade students’ reading skills. A separate RCT focused on dosage, conducted by a researcher from the University of Chicago, revealed that fewer sessions of tutoring using a 1:2 tutor-student ratio had larger impacts on student reading skills than the same model that engaged students in more sessions with a 1:3 tutor-student ratio. Accelerate has also used its role as an intermediary funder of research to objectively analyze and disseminate research findings, helping inform school and district implementation trade-offs, such as the balance between expected tutoring impact and program cost or whether tutoring outperforms alternative academic recovery interventions like digital learning or out-of-school instruction.
Although there is robust evidence underlying tutoring interventions and multiple efforts in place to evaluate the impacts of those approaches, school districts continue to grapple with how to provide the optimal amount, type, and format of tutoring to students with differing needs, while also weighing the costs of tutoring, which currently range from $1,200 to $2,500 for high-impact models. To support decision-making on what type of tutoring works, for whom, under what conditions, and at what cost, we made a grant to the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC in 2024 to support the completion of the Personalized Learning Initiative study, featuring RCTs of tutoring programs in eight school districts across seven states. The research team is using machine learning to estimate personalized treatment effects of tutoring supports across diverse learners and, although the study won’t be completed until spring 2026, the initiative has already provided meaningful results for the field.
Preliminary results from Fulton County, GA and Chicago, IL find that high-impact tutoring boosted math skills by as much as two-thirds of a year of learning. Other early work focused on implementation found that out-of-school tutoring—particularly in a fairly rural context like New Mexico—is challenging to implement and likely not nearly as impactful as in-school programming. A separate implementation study offered helpful guidance for districts on successful implementation related to scheduling and whole-school buy-in. To maximize the impact of tutoring programs once they’re adopted, we’ve funded the National Student Support Accelerator and the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting to translate academic research into easy-to-implement practice.
Our Catalytic Role
Overdeck Family Foundation is dedicated to scaling high-impact tutoring programs and approaches proven to boost student achievement, while also evaluating opportunities to increase the cost-effectiveness of those programs. Since 2017, we’ve invested $19.2 million to scale and research high-impact tutoring, with a key goal of identifying the specific models that work, for whom, under what conditions, and at what cost. Collectively, our investments, including a cohort of Strategic Data Project fellows at Accelerate and five of their state partners, are helping the field develop strong regulatory frameworks that support the adoption of effective in-school tutoring and enable the cost-effective scale of high-impact tutoring, a proven practice that can counteract COVID-19 pandemic-related learning loss while supporting all students to reach their full potential.
High-Impact Tutoring
PortfolioInnovative Schools
Our Funding to Date$19.2 million since 2017
Our collective work aims to build more rigorous and useful practitioner-centered evidence that not only strengthens teacher professional learning but also transforms educational practices—empowering teachers and improving outcomes for students.—Dr. Stacey Alicea, Executive Director, Research Partnership for Professional Learning
The Problem
Despite compelling evidence that standards-aligned, academically rigorous curricula boost student achievement, only 35 percent of English language arts teachers and 51 percent of math teachers report using at least one of these curricula weekly. Additionally, 23 percent of educators report receiving zero training on implementing rigorous curricula.
The Evidence
Overdeck Family Foundation is committed to helping the field understand the benefits of high-quality instructional materials and improve the fidelity of implementation through curriculum-based professional learning (CBPL). In addition to funding organizations that provide programs and training to district leaders and educators, we’ve also funded research to better understand and communicate the impact of CBPL on teacher practice and, ultimately, student outcomes.
For example, a recent study of Teaching Lab, which partners with school districts to provide professional learning for teachers that is explicitly focused on improving the use of rigorous curricula, found that its curriculum-based professional learning is linked to improved teacher practices. Coaches, school leaders, and administrators reported that teachers who participated in Teaching Lab professional learning used substantially stronger teacher practices—with differences ranging from 38-50 percentage points—than comparison group teachers. Sixty-seven percent of these observers said that teachers participating in professional learning asked questions and assigned tasks that addressed the analytical thinking required by grade-level standards, compared to only 17 percent of those reporting on comparison group teachers. Eighty-eight percent of observers indicated that lessons taught by educators receiving Teaching Lab supports were focused on a high-quality text or task, compared to 42 percent of comparison group teachers. Additionally, a rigorous study (unpublished as of December 2024) on its math PL in New Mexico found teachers randomly assigned to Teaching Lab outperformed their peers on outside observers’ assessment of classroom discourse, including prompting student thinking. The Foundation is now supporting Teaching Lab in a range of more rigorous evidence-building activities including multiple large-scale randomized controlled trials to quantify its impact on student achievement and related outcomes.
We’ve also funded research to better understand the impact of training instructional leaders to provide professional learning, versus training teachers directly. Recent evidence suggests training school leaders can boost student achievement while being less time- and cost-intensive compared to providing professional learning directly to teachers. For instance, a quasi-experimental study of Leading Educators, a CBPL organization with a fellowship model that provides instructional leaders ongoing, job-embedded professional learning, found that a school’s participation in the program increased student proficiency rates both during and after the program: by 5.7 percentage points in English language arts and 3.9 percentage points in math, on average. Using a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of school-level participation on students’ academic achievement in third through eighth grade, researchers found that achievement effects were larger when instructional leaders participated in the fellowship for two years and when district and school leaders participated in the program alongside one another. Taken together, findings from this work corroborate earlier experimental evidence showing positive impacts of Leading Educators’ professional learning on student achievement and demonstrate the potential power of training instructional leaders to expand and deepen the reach of CBPL.
We also understand the importance of creating conditions in education systems that support research and evidence-building to improve the implementation of rigorous curricula and professional learning. Since 2022, we’ve invested in the Research Partnership for Professional Learning, a nonprofit that connects professional learning organizations and school/district leaders to researchers to identify high-impact practices and help policymakers implement them. Twenty-three studies are currently underway to build stronger evidence to increase teacher engagement, accelerate teachers’ skill development, support sustained adoption of high-quality instructional practices, improve the conditions for adult learning, and build a stronger research and development infrastructure for professional learning.
Our Catalytic Role
Overdeck Family Foundation is committed to scaling evidence-based approaches that show potential to improve teacher practice and student outcomes. Since 2016, the Foundation has invested more than $19 million in efforts to improve and expand CBPL with an explicit focus on evaluating innovative approaches to make professional learning more impactful and cost-effective. This work is helping the field better understand the most effective ways to leverage professional learning to improve teaching and learning for all students.
Curriculum-Based Professional Learning
PortfolioExceptional Educators
Our Funding to Date$19 million since 2016
