How Tutoring Affects School Attendance

In early 2024, initial reports indicated that tutoring might not only help kids catch up academically after the pandemic, but could also combat chronic absenteeism and increase school attendance. More recent research, however, suggests that prediction may have been overly optimistic. Stanford University researchers have been studying Washington, D.C.’s $33 million investment in tutoring, which provided extra help to more than 5,000 of the district’s 100,000 students in 2022-23, the second year of a three-year tutoring initiative. When researchers looked at these students’ test scores, they found minimal to modest improvements in reading or math.

“We weren’t seeing a ton of big impacts on achievement,” said Monica Lee, one of the Stanford researchers. “But what we were seeing at that point in time were promising findings that the tutoring might be doing something for attendance.” This is important because absenteeism soared after the pandemic. The National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford-based organization that studies, promotes and seeks to improve tutoring, issued a March 2024 press release proclaiming that tutoring had increased student attendance in Washington, and could potentially address widespread chronic absenteeism, which was a particular scourge in the city. Soon after, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed an additional $4.8 million for tutoring.

Then, in December, Stanford researchers with the National Student Support Accelerator released an academic paper with more details about the heralded boost to attendance in Washington. Lee and her research team analyzed tutoring schedules for more than 4,000 of the students and calculated that a student was 7 percent less likely to be absent from school on a day when tutoring was on the schedule, compared with a day when tutoring was not on the schedule. The researchers thought that perhaps students felt like they were learning in these sessions, or enjoyed the personal attention, and looked forward to them. Tutoring schedules ranged from once a week to daily. A student scheduled to receive tutoring three times a week, the recommended minimum for effective catch-up tutoring, would attend a total of 1.3 more days of school, on average, over a 180-day school year.

“That feels minimal, just a day or so,” Lee admitted. But she said it was “encouraging to move the needle at all,” with this group of economically disadvantaged students. More than 80 percent of the tutored students were Black. The remainder were largely Hispanic. What’s striking is the high average absenteeism rate among the thousands of students selected for tutoring: 17 percent. In other words, these students had missed more than 30 days, not including weekends. A large subset of them – one out of six – were considered to be “extremely absent,” missing more than 30 percent of the school year. That’s about 60 school days. “They’re missing school at an alarming rate,” said Lee. No wonder these children and teens are so far behind. And no wonder Washington’s leaders wanted tutors for these kids, who were at risk of falling further behind and ultimately becoming dropouts.

Some students’ attendance increased by a lot more. Middle school students were the most likely to attend school on a tutoring day, translating to 2.1 additional days of school for a student who was scheduled three times a week. High school students were the least likely to be motivated to attend school. Their attendance wasn’t much different between days with and without tutoring. Tutoring scheduled during the school day was more of a motivator to show up than tutoring scheduled after school. Smaller tutor-to-student ratios of 1-to-1 or 1-to-2 were more effective in reducing absenteeism than larger tutoring groups of three or four students. All of the tutoring was in-person, not online.

Much of what schools actually try in education is rarely studied and analyzed rigorously. Research like this helps school leaders reflect on what works and what doesn’t. Washington deserves credit for trying tutoring, which had shown strong benefits in hundreds of earlier, albeit smaller studies, and for opening its doors to researchers to study its big rollout. The Stanford study makes the argument that tutoring itself helps to re-engage kids in school and that any improvement in attendance is worthwhile.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services