High-dosage tutoring is one of the most effective methods to accelerate student learning, with research showing gains of up to a third of a grade level per year. Yet, despite significant state and district investment in tutoring post-pandemic, results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress show minimal improvement in students’ math and literacy skills. Key challenges, including inconsistent implementation and insufficient datasets, are dampening tutoring’s potential impact.
Recognizing this challenge, Overdeck Family Foundation coalesced two partners to help states and districts assess the implementation of high-dosage tutoring: Accelerate, a national nonprofit dedicated to scaling promising practices in public education, and The Strategic Data Project (SDP) at Harvard University, which equips education leaders with the ability to use data for strategic decision-making.
Accelerate’s States Leading Recovery (SLR) grant program provides states with funding and support to enhance and scale high-dosage tutoring. This partnership brought Accelerate and representatives from five SLR states—Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana, and Ohio—together with SDP Fellows that were tasked with “building a common playbook for high-dosage tutoring, so success in one place can spark progress everywhere,” said Dr. Jason Godfrey, director of data science at Accelerate.
During the two-year program, SDP Fellows operated in a first-of-its-kind cohort model to collaborate on state-level data projects focused on tracking implementation and evaluating the impact of high-dosage tutoring programs. Fellows improved tracking processes in their own states while sharing tools and tips across their networks, fostering peer learning and the co-creation of actionable resources. “When states learn together, they can build what none of them could build alone. This fellowship created the community and the data infrastructure needed to move beyond tracking participation toward truly measuring quality and impact—and that shift is transformational for tutoring,” said Miriam Greenberg, senior director for the Strategic Data Project.
The collaboration culminated in the development of two key resources: a High-Dosage Tutoring Toolkit featuring practical strategies, tools, and best practices to help states and districts collect, analyze, and use data to strengthen tutoring programs; and DATAS, an open-source schema for interoperable tutoring data that provides tailored insights with minimal overhead. Together, these tools embed data collection into the design of tutoring programs and provide scalable solutions to common challenges, helping to ensure that tutoring investments translate into measurable gains for students, beyond increased participation.
We believe that supporting innovative field-wide collaboration between organizations focused on evidence-based practices will ultimately help fuel the sector’s ability to deliver high-quality tutoring at scale. Building on this success, a new cohort of SDP Fellows from six additional SLR states launched in October 2025, putting the High-Dosage Tutoring Toolkit into action and further extending its impact.
