Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The Next Big Thing—iPads for all! small class sizes! adaptive software!—is going to change education as we know it.
If you’ve been around teaching and learning for more than a minute, restrain your natural skepticism when I tell you that high-impact tutoring is a Thing that genuinely could and is changing education as we know it. I make this claim for two reasons.
First, research backs it up. According to Brown University professor Matthew Kraft, high-impact tutoring is “among the most effective education interventions ever to be subjected to rigorous evaluation.” When the basic tenets of high-impact tutoring are followed—same tutor with the same student; student-to-tutor ratio of no more than 4:1; at least 90 minutes of tutoring per week—gains in student achievement reliably follow.
My second reason for claiming that high-impact tutoring is changing education hearkens back to a catchphrase popularized during the Watergate scandal: “Follow the money.” According to a research paper published at the journal Education Finance and Policy earlier this year (co-authored by Education Next’s editor-in-chief Martin West), the number of private tutoring centers in the U.S. tripled from 1997 to 2022, with almost all of that growth concentrated in affluent neighborhoods. Wealthy parents in the U.S. are spending billions of dollars each year on tutoring for their kids because they know it works. The public policy question is less about tutoring’s effectiveness but rather who has access to it.
In her new book, The Future of Tutoring, author Liz Cohen offers a grounded, practitioner-oriented roadmap for school leaders who want to understand exactly how schools have been incorporating tutoring into their schedule. (Full disclosure: I and the organization I lead are featured in the book.) Cohen’s timing is perfect. The past five years have seen what feels like a tectonic policy shift: Tutoring has moved from the sidelines to center stage in conversations about post-pandemic recovery and what school can look like moving forward.
by Liz Cohen
Harvard Education Press, 2025, $35.00; 208 pages
As Cohen recounts, within a year of Covid-19’s disruptions, more than 10,000 U.S. school districts had rolled out some form of tutoring. She does not treat this development as an unmitigated triumph—she is clear-eyed about the missteps, faltering efforts to scale, and cases in which tutoring fell short and why.
The strength of her book lies in how she organizes her narrative around the practical levers that school leaders must pull and the barriers they have to negotiate: aligning incentives and buy-in from teachers, creating a culture of tutoring, setting up sustainable funding, recruiting and training high-quality tutors, monitoring fidelity and outcomes, and adapting to local contexts. Cohen resists the temptation to lionize a single model. She presents a menu of design choices, along with trade-offs, pitfalls, and caveats. What results is not a prescription but an orientation: a how-to for principals and their implementation partners.
One of the more refreshing aspects of Cohen’s analysis is her willingness to surface uncomfortable truths about where tutoring failed. Tutoring programs that began as emergency relief often faltered when federal pandemic funds tapered off. Some districts underestimated the logistics of matching students, coordinating schedules, or retaining consistent tutors. Others failed to integrate tutoring deeply enough into the instructional core, treating it as “remediation” for struggling students rather than opportunity to personalize learning for all students. By being candid about these failures, Cohen gives her leaders permission to anticipate challenges and build in adaptations from the start.
