Michelle Mercer 
Michelle Mercer reported in 2022 on a back-to-school discussion with iTutor’s Hayley Spira-Bauer and the National Parents Union’s Tafshier Cosby about teacher shortages, high dosage tutoring and social-emotional learning. A new section after the report looks at what happened to tutoring programs once pandemic relief funds ended and what the research says makes tutoring work.
Widespread teacher shortages are placing even more stress on school communities across the country. To help support schools during the pandemic, the federal government issued more than $189 billion in relief funding to K-12 schools in the United States. There are criteria for using these funds to support education interventions, school infrastructure, technology investments, and pay for district employees.
As students return to school for the 2022-23 school year, the ongoing challenges to K-12 education because of the pandemic continue to create stress for students, families, and educators.
It’s estimated that, on average, students are two-to-four months behind where they should be in math and reading, according to a recent study by The White House. As educators knew all too well before the pandemic, addressing learning loss while also trying to keep students engaged with grade level curriculum has always been a formidable endeavor, and it’s been exacerbated by disruptions over the last two years. Although declines might be measured in months of learning loss, it can take years for students to catch up.
Now that many districts have made expenditures to directly address issues uncovered by the pandemic – upgrading HVAC systems to improve air quality in schools and investing in 1:1 tech devices, for example – remaining funds are being allocated to address many issues still facing learning communities according to Hayley Spira-Bauer, Chief Academic Officer of iTutor, an edtech company, focused on solving teacher shortages with certified educators in all 50 states.
Spira-Bauer recently joined Tafshier Cosby, the National Organizing Director of the National Parents Union, for a live discussion with New 12 Long Island focused on current best practices and strategies to support students and teachers as they head back to school.
High-dosage tutoring
Tutoring has always been a great way to help students close learning gaps, but for most families, access to supplemental tutoring required an expensive commitment to after-school sessions by third-party providers once or twice a week.
Now, many districts are seeing the benefits of providing high-dosage tutoring during the school day. For this intervention to be most effective, Spira-Bauer says that tutoring should be offered at least three times a week for an hour at a time. She says devoting an hour at a time really helps students grapple with concepts and gives tutors a chance to do formative assessments.
Spira-Bauer says learning gaps are most effectively addressed by frequent, consistent tutoring, ideally with the help of a long-term tutor who can build relationships with students and parallel the learning that is currently taking place in the classroom. School-provided tutoring can be offered as an afterschool program, but providing it during the school day can ease the burden on working parents and ensure that a high-dosage tutoring initiative is as inclusive as possible.
SEL is not a fad
Both Spira-Bauer and Cosby emphasize the importance of Social Emotional Learning to help create learning communities that are safe, inclusive, and healthy for both students and teachers.
SEL is not a one or two-time intervention, according to Spira-Bauer, and says it needs to be at the forefront of high-dosage tutoring to help unwind the trauma students and teachers have endured during the pandemic. “You cannot academically progress without attending to the social-emotional needs of the students,” she said.
Meaningful support for teachers
Teacher shortages are at a crisis level in many schools across the country, and Spira-Bauer says changing the way we think about the teaching profession and how it functions is critical to mitigating teacher burnout.
Spira-Bauer says she’s been inspired by community-based efforts to make school systems more sustainable by not placing all of the responsibility on people with teaching degrees. For example, organizations like the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and arts and music programs can provide alternative environments for students, and introducing other adults to the school environment, like interventionists who can offer support to subject teachers, can relieve a lot of the pressure on teachers.
For this reason, support roles are critical to school communities. Office employees, bus drivers, and other staff can provide attention and SEL support to students.
How parents can help
Parents have always played a critical role in the success of their students’ education, and many district leaders were encouraged to see increased engagement with families during the pandemic. Building on those relationships is key to helping teachers and students right now and going forward.
The best thing parents can do is to learn about what interventions are available to their students and advocate for them. For example, if your school proposes a high-dosage tutoring program, it’s important to keep an open mind and support innovative interventions that can provide districts with valuable data insights and help your student catch up.
Connecting with advocacy organizations like Parent Impact, which Cosby also helps lead, can help parents understand the challenges facing school districts, learn about new interventions, provide support to teachers, and feel empowered to join important discussions about the future of education.
High dosage tutoring in 2026: what the evidence says now that pandemic relief funding has ended
Hayley Spira-Bauer of iTutor, quoted above, described high dosage tutoring in 2022 as tutoring offered at least three times a week for an hour at a time, ideally with a long-term tutor who knows the student. That description matches what researchers now call high-impact tutoring, and the question for 2026 is whether districts can keep it going after the federal pandemic relief money that paid for many programs has run out. This section reports what the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) at Stanford found in 2026, what the research says makes tutoring work, and how tutoring relates to the staffing pressures the 2022 article describes. Spira-Bauer works for iTutor, a company that provides tutoring, and readers should weigh that when reading the original claims.
What makes tutoring effective
EdSurge, in an article of October 15, 2026, reports that high-impact tutoring typically takes place at least three times a week and complements classroom work. It cites NSSA’s view that programs with frequent sessions over at least 10 weeks, individual or small-group delivery and data-driven instruction can produce three to 15 months of additional learning. It also cites Annenberg Institute estimates of $1,200 to $2,500 per student per year. These are summary figures and the real results vary by program, subject and the quality of delivery.
What happened to programs after the relief funds
The NSSA published a brief on September 15, 2026, How is high-impact tutoring enduring after ESSER?, based on a survey of 35 district tutoring programs and interviews with administrators from 15 of those districts and one outside the sample. Eight districts (23 percent) paused or disrupted tutoring, eight (23 percent) significantly reduced it, 11 (31 percent) maintained it, and eight (23 percent) expanded it. More than half preserved or expanded their programs, though the brief covers a small group and does not claim to represent all districts. Districts that scaled back or stopped often cited high vendor costs, limited in-house capacity, weak outcome data and budget pressure.
How districts kept tutoring going
- Using data to make the case. District champions used implementation and outcome data to argue for funding, especially to philanthropic funders.
- Serving fewer students more consistently. Districts targeted the students who needed it most and kept the schedule reliable, which improved fidelity.
- Building tutoring into existing systems. Tutoring was placed inside multi-tiered systems of support or response-to-intervention structures, aligning tutors, interventionists and teachers and connecting the work to more stable funding.
- Using local tutors and partnerships. Districts used local tutors, such as high school students, and partnerships with universities, funders and community groups to lower costs.
EdSurge adds examples such as adding intervention periods to the school day, which costs less than a separate program, and checking progress data every two to three weeks. It also reports a warning from the researcher Blazar that schools facing cuts may increase group sizes, reduce session frequency or switch to cheaper providers, changes that can weaken the features that make tutoring effective.
Tutoring and the teacher shortage
The 2022 article links tutoring to teacher shortages, with Spira-Bauer suggesting that interventionists and other adults can relieve pressure on subject teachers. The NSSA report that some districts use local tutors and place tutoring inside existing intervention systems is consistent with that idea in practice. The sources used for this section did not measure whether tutoring programs reduce teacher turnover or workload, so that link is a reasonable hypothesis and not a result. The same sources do show that tutoring depends on staffing: a district without enough tutors, trained or otherwise, has to shrink its program or change its design.
What a district or a parent can ask
- How often do students meet with a tutor, for how long, and in what group size?
- Does the tutor see the same students over time, and does the tutor know what the classroom teacher is teaching?
- Is tutoring offered during the school day, so that students with work or family duties after school are not left out?
- What does the district track, such as attendance at sessions and progress on assessments, and who sees the results?
- If funding changes, will the district reduce the number of students served or reduce the quality of tutoring?
Spira-Bauer told parents to learn what interventions are available and to advocate for them. A parent can use the questions above to find out whether a proposed program has the features that research links to results, and a school board member can use them to see whether a program kept after relief funds ended has kept those features.
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