Why does High Impact Tutoring Matter? New Jersey’s bet on tutoring

Dear Colleagues,

High-impact tutoring is one of the most consistently effective ways to get students on track academically, attend school, and build confidence in learning. In the 23-24 school year, the New Jersey Department of Education pooled together all remaining federal ESSER funds and created a $52 million Notice of Grant Opportunity for districts to implement high-impact tutoring programs in-house or with an approved vendor. 22 districts selected NJTC as their in-person tutoring vendor to serve over 3600 scholars. Collectively, these districts were awarded $ 3.2 million to work with NJTC and serve students in grades K-8 in math and literacy. With these funds, NJTC was able to implement their nationally accredited high impact tutoring program and successfully delivered 30,400 tutoring sessions or 3.1 million minutes of tutoring.

Further, the NJTC’s program is Badged by the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) at Stanford University, the preeminent leader and national source for research on high-impact tutoring released their most recent findings. High-Impact tutoring can reduce absenteeism, among other things. The relationships built with tutors who are consistently working with the same students helps make a connection at school for some that was missing.

In 2022-23, 16.6% of New Jersey’s students were chronically absent. This amounts to 214,700 students. It goes without saying that the more students are not in school, the less likely they are to meet academic goals or worse, complete high school graduation. Students that work with NJTC complete short, end-of-session surveys. One survey item asks them to respond to the question “How confident are you that you understood the material from this tutoring session?” ranging from not confident at all to extremely confident. The first circle graph shows our current school year data for 24-25. The second circle graph shows our survey data from the 23-24 school year.

High Impact tutoring continues to be the strongest and most effective way to accelerate student achievement, increase learning confidence and decrease chronic absenteeism. New Jersey can continue to be a leader nationwide when they choose to invest in high-impact tutoring and the growth of the New Jersey Tutoring Corps, Inc.

In partnership,

Katherine Bassett, CEO