NEW JERSEY TUTORING CORPS, INC. AWARDED
NATIONAL TUTORING QUALITY STANDARDS BADGE
BY STANFORD UNIVERSITY’S NATIONAL STUDENT SUPPORT ACCELERATOR

[New Jersey – November 12, 2024] The National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) at Stanford University has announced that New Jersey Tutoring Corps, Inc. (NJTC) has received its prestigious national “Tutoring Program Design Badge,” formally indicating that NJTC meets the highest tutoring standards and aligns with the national principles of all Tutoring Quality Standards.  

Specifically, the NSSA Badge is earned through a rigorous analysis by NSSA’s Technical Assistance Providers (TAPs), which are comprised of national education leaders and experts trained to use the NSSA’s evaluation system. The national recognition was created for both tutoring providers and local school districts to ensure tutoring organizations, in an increasingly oversaturated market, are differentiated by the quality of their program and monitored to reflect that “high-impact” tutoring is aligned to specific research-backed standards. Each tutoring organization that wishes to be considered n for the NSSA Badge is reviewed through a variety of categories, including Tutor Recruitment and Selection, Tutor Preservice Training, Student-Tutor Relationship, Program Effectiveness and Improvement, Formative Assessment, Student Progress Measure, Tutor Coaching and Feedback, Tutor Consistency and Ratio High-Quality Instructional Materials, Dosage, Setting, and Integration with School Schedule, Safety Protocols, Data Privacy and Security, Program Design, Organizational Culture.

“Just two years ago, New Jersey had no statewide tutoring infrastructure for its scholars,” stated NJTC’s Chief Executive Officer Katherine Bassett. “Since then, NJTC built a strong and efficient team, continuously vetted and trained our tutors, developed partnerships with school districts and community organizations throughout the state, and dramatically scaled statewide.  Most of all, through the support of various foundations, the state, and in partnership with local school districts, New Jersey has built a rigorous model for how tutoring can best serve our local communities.  With an all-hands-on-deck approach and great urgency and passion, NJTC has created a tutoring and training infrastructure that is simply unprecedented, and we continue to change the paradigm for how tutoring can best serve our communities.  Today’s announcement is a testament to the hard work of our great team, which has remained committed to building this important new resource for the Garden State.  We are grateful to Governor Murphy, Senate Majority Leader Ruiz, and Senate Education Committee Chair Gopal for their consistent support, which has been instrumental to the results we see in school districts statewide.  NJTC is committed to ensuring all New Jersey students have the opportunity to grow and develop, and we remain committed to driving innovation and working to ensure that every child in the state has access to high-impact tutoring.”

As part of its mission and belief in transparency, NJTC just released last week the findings of its “Impact Report,” conducted each year by an independent researcher unaffiliated with the organization.   The report tracked the growth of scholars with whom NJTC worked during the last school year, reviewed NJTC’s training protocols, and examined quantitative and qualitative data collected by NJTC for scholars participating in the 2023/24 school year program in Math and Literacy.  This school year’s report highlighted significant gains in the number of NJTC scholars meeting statewide grade-level standards.  In math, prior to NJTC tutoring, only 4% were grade-level proficient. After 10-20 weeks of NJTC tutoring, grade-level proficiency jumped to 26%.  In Literacy, NJTC scholars improved grade-level proficiency from 12 percent to 30 percent.

Initially established by First Lady Tammy Murphy, Laura Overdeck, and anchor institutions such as the Overdeck Family Foundation, the Community Foundation of New Jersey, The Tepper Foundation, the New Jersey Children’s Foundation, the Prudential Foundation, and the Debra and Kenneth Caplan Foundation, NJTC serves as a needed corrective response to the state’s dramatic learning gaps exacerbated by the pandemic. In the two years since its launch, NJTC has scaled to serve over 3600 scholars with 25 partners in 80 sites statewide, employing 57 site coordinators and 226 tutors. During NJTC’s first school year cycle in 2022-23, in comparison, it served approximately 500 scholars.   

Specifically, NJTC co-designs tutoring programs with schools, districts, and community partners, ensuring its research-based, evidence-rich program meets individual partners’ needs. NJTC staff members provide responsive, personalized, hands-on instruction aligned to New Jersey state standards. Partners co-design each implementation. Tutors are often embedded in classrooms during the school day and receive support from instructional coaches and site coordinators. Tutors serve scholars in 30 to 60-minute embedded sessions during the school day, after school, or in summer programs two to three times per week. The program provides a 1:1 up to 1:3 tutor-to-scholar ratio for each tutoring session, with sessions held two to three times weekly for 30 to 60 minutes with the same tutor working with the same scholars throughout a program cycle, following the recommendations of the Annenberg Institute.