A HIGH-DOSAGE tutoring program in Fall River is helping first graders who started the year behind in their reading skills get on track. Without this tutoring intervention, students may not catch up to a point where they are capable, independent readers set up for success in second grade and beyond.
The program is a game changer in Fall River and other communities where it’s being piloted and could dramatically improve student literacy in Massachusetts if access is expanded. A proposal from Gov. Healey to allocate $25 million for early literacy high dosage tutoring would make it available to 10,000 students.
Massachusetts has an early literacy crisis. Just 42 percent of the Commonwealth’s third graders met or exceeded expectations in reading on the 2024 MCAS exams. Results for some student subgroups were even more startling: 76 percent of low-income students, 73 percent of Black students, 78 percent of Latino students, and 86 percent of children with disabilities didn’t meet expectations.
Not all of this can be attributed to setbacks from the pandemic. Massachusetts reading proficiency rates on the National Assessment of Educational Progress were stagnant, hovering around 50 percent, between 2011 and 2017 even before the pandemic, and since then have plummeted.
Reading by third grade is a pivotal benchmark. Students who don’t learn to read by third grade can’t read to learn, thus compromising all of a child’s learning in future grades and creating an unmeetable set of demands for educators across all content areas. Getting students reading at grade level is one of our state’s most urgent educational challenges.
To help support the literacy development of young readers, we need innovative new approaches that complement the work of our dedicated teachers, school, and district leaders who are adopting science-based reading curricula and doubling down on professional development for teachers.
In Fall River, we have done this work, adopting strong instructional materials and making sure that our teachers have training on how to use them. Yet for some of our learners this is not enough; data show up to 60 percent of students need more intensive instruction and frequent repetition of targeted practice to learn foundational reading skills.
The high-dosage tutoring model in Fall River provides exactly that. Students in the program, which is run by Ignite Reading, meet one-on-one virtually every school day for 15 minutes with the same highly trained tutor who provides targeted, data-driven instruction that helps students master foundational literacy skills – letter sounds, common letter patterns, sight word recognition, and more. The results are impressive.
A Johns Hopkins University evaluation of the impact of this first grade tutoring program, funded by the One8 Foundation in 13 public school districts across the state last school year, shows tutored students grew substantially more than expected as compared to national norms, achieving 5.4 months of additional learning over the course of the year.
Last year, 16 percent of first grade students in the program scored at or above the beginning-of-year grade-level composite benchmark on DIBELS, an assessment of basic literacy skills, compared to 50 percent meeting or exceeding the end-of-year benchmark. These results are remarkable, particularly given that the program intentionally serves students who have gaps in their learning and are often furthest behind, and that the composite benchmark is a moving target that sets higher expectations as the year progresses.
The program is strongly supported by teachers and literacy specialists who, despite their very best efforts and training, simply do not have enough time in the day to provide this kind of one-on-one instruction for students. Yet, the program design promotes deep collaboration between tutors and teachers, who meet regularly to review data and discuss what’s working and what’s not for individual students. Our classroom teachers and tutors from Ignite are working together to meet the unique needs of every student.
This program is also scalable, as the research demonstrates. Because the tutoring is delivered virtually, tutors can work from home and can be recruited from all over the country. Tutors are paid an hourly wage that makes this work desirable.
Making this program work at scale will also require dedicated staffing at the state level to manage tutoring vendors with an eye toward quality control, oversight, and consistent implementation across districts, replicating the conditions in place under the pilot. Over the course of the pilot, the One8 Foundation housed a team that was able to coordinate across the tutoring provider and the districts, monitor implementation data, set policies for the use of tutoring seats, troubleshoot when needed, and facilitate the sharing of best practices across schools. This type of program coordination is critical to maintaining the quality of results.Â
This new, research-backed tutoring model is the intervention we need in Massachusetts to finally make significant progress on early literacy. In theory, over time, schools with strong classroom instruction and curricula who use high-dosage tutoring interventions to support students who have fallen behind could expect to see reading proficiency rates reach 70 to 80 percent compared to current third grade proficiency rates of just 42 percent.
While philanthropic funding has allowed for a strong proof-of-concept here in the Commonwealth, state funding is needed to meaningfully expand and sustain this work so that it is a predictable and coherent part of the state literacy ecosystem, available to the students who need this extra support.
Tracy Curley is superintendent of the Fall River Public Schools. Ed Lambert is executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education.
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