The New Era of Tutoring: Q&A with Liz Cohen (Part 1)
Liz's new book and the ideas and experiences shaping tutoring in K-12 education today
Last week I stepped back to look at what recent national surveys tell us about K-12 tutoring demand, usage, and access. Steady parent interest, substantial usage, uneven access, and evolving school-based offerings suggest tutoring continues to matter a lot for many families and schools in 2025.
This week I’m continuing that exploration with an email Q&A I had with Liz Cohen, vice president of policy at 50CAN. Last month Liz published her new book, The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives.
I’m grateful Liz was willing to share her time, experiences, and insights. With compelling research and writing, she chronicles one of the most significant and fast-scaling school-based interventions in recent memory. It’s rare to find someone who has spent so much time inside districts, schools, and tutoring programs, maintaining grounded historical and research perspectives, and also holding a clear-eyed view of the public policy environment.
Below is the first half of our conversation. We touch on how tutoring gained momentum during and after the COVID pandemic and what we have learned so far with so many school districts implementing school-based tutoring.
Part 2 will follow this Friday with the second half of our interview.
Background and Context
Paul: You’ve spent about two decades in education policy, research, and government. And now you’ve written your first book! What made tutoring the right story to tell right now in 2025?
Liz: I think most of us who end up working in education do so because we believe that schools can be better, that education can be better, that we can better serve American children. But sometimes, after a decade or two, you start wondering, “Does any of this work?” Right now we need evidence and stories of ideas that work, and there’s no better story than that of the post-pandemic tutoring movement.
One-hundred fifty years ago, we decided in this country to democratize access to public education. And now we are beginning to democratize access to personalized instruction. It’s exciting, energetic, and optimistic. But really this is a story of how adults across the U.S. converged around a new version of an old idea, led by evidence, and put the needs of kids first. It’s about what happens on the rare occasion when we (mostly) agree on what to do next.
Paul: What convinced you that tutoring could be an essential lever for learning recovery rather than a limited one as a pandemic-specific intervention?
Liz: Visiting schools. Once I saw good tutoring in action, and I saw how the teachers like it, how the kids are engaged, how the principals are buzzing with excitement, I realized this was about more than the pandemic. Plus, let’s be honest. The pandemic revealed the extent of existing problems while also exacerbating those same issues. If something works to help kids learn, especially once schools have invested in getting programs off the ground, we should be open to keeping that new thing going.
I have wondered often if we’re reaching the limits of how much can be achieved in our current classroom model. Tutoring allows for new ways to think about what classrooms look like, how the school day flows, and who plays instructional roles with students. I like tutoring both for the actual tutoring and also for how it can help us think big about doing school differently.
Paul: In your fieldwork and interviews, was there a student, educator, tutor or moment that shifted how you think about what learning support really means?
Liz: More than one, but here’s one I still think about often. It was a conversation with a 5th-grade math teacher in Odessa, Texas. We were talking about acceleration, actually, which is a kind of support. The teacher told me that every year he has one or two students who are ready to start 6th-grade math content. But he never felt like he could provide that opportunity, mostly because he was concerned about whether it would detract from their ability to perform on the 5th grade state assessment.
When his school began the tutoring program, it allowed those few students who were ready to progress more rapidly to do exactly that. And the teacher said it just completely shifted his understanding of what students should be able to do and access when they’re ready and he’s changed his teaching practice as a result. I loved not only the revelation he had, but in general I admire when people are willing to let new information change their beliefs and behavior.
Liz Cohen. The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2025.
Pandemic Lessons
Paul: Why do you think tutoring only achieved more adoption and scale during and after the pandemic, despite evidence of its benefits before the pandemic?
Liz: A remarkable convergence of four factors: 1) more students with more need for academic support than ever before, because of pandemic-era school closures and disruptions; 2) new evidence, in particular the study of Saga’s Algebra I tutoring program that showed an entire year’s worth of academic gain, along with researchers committing to building a stronger evidence base; 3) $129 billion of federal funds with 20% required to be used to address learning loss; and 4) advocates and policy leaders who all stood up and said, “Let’s follow the evidence and give kids what they need in this moment.”
Paul: What distinguished high-impact tutoring programs that you found successful from those that stumbled or faded quickly?
Liz: The biggest factor is a commitment to implementation. Running a new program is hard, making changes to schedules, staffing, culture, etc is really hard. There are always bumps in the road. The most successful programs had a significant dedication to implementation, including clear implementation leaders, but one other key piece is an executive champion, a superintendent or principal who said, “This is important and I want this to happen.”
Paul: Do you see lasting institutional or cultural lessons from the pandemic that could make schools more adaptive in the future?
Liz: This could maybe be a whole other book! The biggest cultural shift around education from the pandemic is parent empowerment. This includes everything from parents realizing their kids weren’t really being taught to read, as Emily Hanford showed us in Sold a Story, to parents turning to homeschooling and microschools, to parents demanding more school choice, and to parents wanting more and better information about how their child is faring in school. I hope schools will see parents both as customers and partners. Time marches on, though. In just a few years from now, kindergarten students will have been born after the pandemic entirely. It’s hard to say if new parents will be influenced by the experience some of us lived through.
I think a lot about the idea that we live in an age of consumer choice. I’m not even talking about schools. Just think about the number of products in a grocery story, the variety of washing machines you can buy, the 73 different types of gloves available on Amazon. There’s some evidence that having choice makes consumers want more choice (ask me sometime about craft beer and the beverage industry, I’ve got data!), and I’m curious to see whether the broader consumer choice context continues to influence new parents in the coming years.
Implementation
Paul: From your perspective, what are two or three key elements that advance “high-impact” tutoring at scale?
Liz: A laser focus on implementation and the use of tutoring as a strategy in a broader overhaul of instruction. That’s what we’re seeing in Louisiana, for example. Louisiana made high-impact tutoring the go-to approach for supporting students below grade-level, and the state legislature put real money into the budget to help districts provide the support. But it came along with an emphasis on curricular materials, teacher training, accountability, etc. And this is also what we’re seeing in DC, where DCPS wants to be the first urban district to close the achievement gap in math. They’re retraining teachers, building new professional development, using a great curriculum, and then tutoring comes in when some students inevitably need support.
One pushback I sometimes get is that people say, “Should we do tutoring or X with our limited funds?” But it’s not about either/or. My question is always, “What will you do to support students who are behind?” Because doing nothing isn’t an option. I’m excited about the comprehensive nature of work happening in states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Arkansas, where they are working on improving multiple pieces of the puzzle at the same time. It’s tutoring and teacher training and teacher pay and school choice and accountability and curriculum. The midcentury rambler that too many states and districts live in is overdue for an upgrade, and you want to renovate the kitchen and the bathrooms and the HVAC.
I appreciate how Liz shares not only her observations of tutoring in a macro way, but also the stories and moments that shaped her understanding of what tutoring can unlock for students. Liz’s research and reflections help connect the national patterns we see in surveys and research with what has actually played out in schools.
On Friday, Part 2 will conclude our Q&A. We’ll look ahead and consider how school districts might sustain tutoring programs as pandemic-era federal funding ends, and what the future of tutoring could look like as school choice programs expand and new technologies emerge.