Nikita Dutt, a sophomore at UC Davis, didn't come to college to work with young children.
But since September, she has spent a couple of hours a day tutoring through the California Volunteer College Corps, a state-funded partnership program that places college students in paid internships.
He earns $700 a month, as long as he tutors elementary students for at least 20 hours every two weeks. She works on mathematics with students in Los Angeles and San Francisco, broadcast through a host program that uses virtual tutoring.
Sometimes, Dutt says, it can be difficult to keep students interested, especially when they are tutored in a busy classroom, which is often the case. But he remembers one student, a sixth grader with a learning disability. She was struggling to understand multiplication. She worked with him, diligently, for about five weeks. One day, it just clicked. It was a big deal for the family and the student, and his teacher later told him that whatever he was doing was working.
“And I realized what a big difference I made in student learning, so I really want to help other students too,” Dutt says.
Dutt is one of the college students recruited as high-dose tutors for struggling schools. Pandemic relief funds allowed many schools to establish these programs. But with ESSER funding nearly lapsed, schools have to find other sources to keep programs going.
Finding a stable pool of affordable tutors has proven difficult, and that's where these college students come in: Leaders of some organizations say college students and community members help increase the number of tutors available for K-12 classrooms. and can also allow schools to finance them more sustainably.
Dutt is also a beneficiary of a new high-dose tutoring training program that hopes to improve the quality of tutors, something researchers have noted as a challenge for schools.
A window that closes
Much of the pandemic relief funds made available to schools went toward tutoring. The Biden Administration identified high-dose tutoring, generally defined as regular, intensive, small-group tutoring, as a plausible way to provide a shock to student learning after the pandemic.
But now, with federal funding dwindling, schools have to trust the states or other sources to keep mentoring programs running.
Funding is the biggest obstacle to tutoring in schools, says Alvin Makori, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education. Makori co-authored a research paper on the challenges faced by schools offering tutoring services at scale. The document, based on surveys of public and charter school teachers in California, also noted concerns about the quality of tutors and problems finding the space and time to incorporate tutoring into the school day as problem areas for the schools it inspected. . (The study did not look at high-dose virtual mentoring, of the kind provided by some of the organizations analyzed here.)
The report also recommends that schools partner with outside organizations to provide tutoring services.
That's where a coalition behind a new tutor training program thinks it can help.
A pair of high-dose tutoring-specific “nanocourse” collections, short lessons under 15 minutes each intended to train tutors, were recently published on Arizona State University's Community Educator Learning Hub platform. The collections were the result of a collaboration between Annenberg Learner, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University, and Step Up Tutoring, with the goal of providing tutors to beleaguered schools. Starting in the fall, the association will also offer a microcredential in high-dose mentoring competencies.
These tutoring resources have the opportunity to build a corps of tutors across the country, because training is a big obstacle to getting willing and effective volunteers and college students, says Korbi Adams, ASU-affiliated senior program manager.
Step Up Tutoring has had around 170 tutors go through the program to gain instructional skills.
During the pandemic, investment in broadband and internet in low-income areas in places like Los Angeles made it possible to connect volunteers to work one-on-one with students, says Sam Olivieri, CEO of Step Up Tutoring.
The need for high-dose mentoring remains very important, says Olivieri. But there are doubts about sustainability.
College students are a promising source of tutors, he maintains. They have relationship-building skills, she says, and tend to have an easier time connecting with younger students who often want to know what it's like to be in college.
There's another reason schools might be eager to adopt the model of harnessing the power of college student-tutors, Olivieri says: Step Up is an approved model. federal work-study provider on 16 university campuses, meaning students' wages come from a sustainable source. They also work with the California College Corps program. From those two sources, they've gotten about 350 tutors, he says, making it the main pool they get tutors from these days.
For schools that work with Step Up, that provides the benefits of mentoring, connecting their children with college students and financial stability, Olivieri says. Not all of those students are education students. But many of them show a potential interest or propensity to explore the field of education, Olivieri says.
Dutt, the UC Davis student, is happy for the opportunity.
She has worked with six students, all between third and sixth grade. Currently, she tutors two students who take lessons from home and two who take them at school. She is also a substitute tutor and fills in for others when they cannot attend in the mornings.
A computer science graduate, she says she previously had no interest in education as a profession. “But then when I started tutoring, I realized how much I liked it and how rewarding it was to help students grow academically and instill confidence in them,” she says. “That's why I think I found a new passion in teaching, tutoring and the field of education.”
