As ESSER funds run out, the programs with lasting results share three traits.
In the wake of pandemic-era learning loss, “high-dosage tutoring” shifted from a targeted intervention to the silver bullet for American education. Backed by massive federal dollars from the post-COVID Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund (ESSER) and broad policy agreement at the state and local level, the formula seemed simple: place a student with a tutor and watch reading scores rebound.
Today, those dollars are spent and researchers, federal officials, and district leaders are evaluating the ROI. Recent reporting from Chalkbeat and other education outlets highlight a sobering reality: while the underlying theory remains sound, many pandemic-era tutoring initiatives fell far short of their promise.
As districts navigate shrinking budgets, everyone from school and district leaders to researchers to federal government officials are asking if tutoring actually worked. But tutoring is simply a tool, and like any tool, it can be deployed effectively or poorly. The real takeaway for those studying post-ESSER investment outcomes should be that transactional tutoring was never a panacea. Lasting academic recovery requires the core ingredients that effective interventions have always needed: structural fidelity, rigorous evidence, and an element too many vendors overlooked entirely: families.
As researchers examine why so many large-scale tutoring efforts produced few or no gains, common failure points emerge: low usage, scheduling challenges, vendor quality, and insufficient dosage. Many providers offered remote homework help they called “high-dosage” instruction, leaving tutors sitting in empty virtual rooms for students who never appeared.
At its core, this was a structural misunderstanding: assuming that Tutor + Student = Results.
Working in this frame, far too many providers ignored the actually most influential factors in student learning, the real humans in children’s lives who help them learn, particularly their caregivers and families. When an intervention is treated as an isolated block of time during or after school, detached from the home and learning ecosystem, student engagement suffers, attendance suffers, and learning gains don’t materialize.
At Springboard Collaborative, the approach starts from a different premise: When schools and families work together as true partners using a proven, evidence-based framework, a child’s full potential is unlocked. Family engagement isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s an operational requirement for learning. When tutoring programs build trust and open communication with caregivers, tutoring stops being an isolated exercise and caregivers gain real tools to support their children’s learning at home, transforming tutoring into a long-lasting culture of literacy that far outlasts a single program cycle.
This relational, family-centered approach isn’t a post-pandemic experiment. Future Forward, housed within Springboard Collaborative, has been refining high-dosage early literacy tutoring in partnership with parents for nearly two decades. While many pandemic-era providers struggled to prove impact, Future Forward holds education research’s gold standard, an ESSA Tier 1 (“Strong”) rating with longitudinal evidence of its effectiveness predating the COVID pandemic tutoring rush, based on robust evidence published in the federal What Works Clearinghouse database. Evaluated through multiple independent Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) studies by university researchers covering 767 students for reading achievement and 1,067 students for attendance tracking, the results found significant reading gains, with an average effect size of +0.16 standard deviations on reading assessments. Additionally, evaluation of Springboard’s Future Forward high-dosage tutoring model found an independent effect size of +0.14 on student attendance.
The attendance finding is particularly critical because chronic absenteeism remains a sizable challenge for schools, and a tutor cannot teach an absent student. Future Forward’s attendance gains stem directly from intentional caregiver engagement, building the trust and home/school alignment that gets kids into school buildings consistently.
The post-ESSER reckoning is necessary. Rushed, low-fidelity programs lacking evidence of effectiveness are winding down, as they should. But leaders should not abandon personalized instruction. The path forward requires shifting away from transactional vendor models and doubling down on relationship-based, proven, high-fidelity approaches.
Tutoring works when it is grounded in rigorous evidence, delivered with structural integrity, and designed to honor and activate the power of families. By uniting schools, tutors, and caregivers around a shared literacy goal, we can build a foundation for student reading achievement that endures. For funders considering where to deploy capital around literacy and early learning, the post-ESSER outcomes offer critical lessons: evidence-based programming with strong implementation fidelity and meaningful family engagement deliver solid results. The path forward requires directing resources toward proven approaches that honor the complexity of students’ lives to build sustainable change.