High-quality tutoring has emerged as an important post-pandemic strategy for helping struggling students in public schools. Research has found that tutoring often results in substantial additional learning gains when delivered during the school day, in small groups with the same tutors, and multiple times a week for at least 10 weeks.
But this high-impact tutoring often comes with a substantial price tag—depending on the model and staffing approach, costs can range from $1,200 to $2,500 per student per year. During the pandemic, many districts relied on federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds to launch or expand tutoring programs, but these temporary funds have largely expired.
Fortunately, states and districts have access to several other funding sources that they can leverage to sustain tutoring. These dollars can be stretched further through “blending” and “braiding,” which allow districts to combine multiple funding streams to cover the costs of tutoring when a single source is insufficient.
Federal Funding
Federal funding for tutoring faced significant uncertainty during the FY26 budget process. Both the president’s and House leaders’ initial proposals called for steep reductions to funding that could support tutoring. Following the longest government shutdown in history in October and November of last year and another shorter one more recently, Congress ultimately passed a spending package that sustains many of these funding streams, at least for the coming year.
School districts may use Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Title I, part A funds—federal aid intended to close achievement gaps for low-income students—to support schoolwide or targeted tutoring programs, depending on a school’s poverty level. Under federal law, schools where at least 40 percent of students are from low-income families can use Title I funds to improve instruction for all students, including through tutoring. Schools below that threshold operate a targeted program, meaning Title I dollars can only be used to support low-income students.
ESEA Title II, part A funds, which support the recruitment, training, and retention of effective educators, cannot be used directly to pay for tutoring services, but they can support the instructional infrastructure behind them. Districts can use these funds to train staff to serve as effective tutors and provide stipends to those who take on additional tutoring responsibilities. ESEA Title IV, parts A and B fund student support, academic enrichment, and afterschool programs—tutoring is an allowable use under both titles.
Other federal funds may be used for tutoring programs that support certain student groups. ESEA Title III and Title VI funds, for example, can be used to train and pay tutors supporting English learners and Native American and Alaska Native Students, respectively. And Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funds can cover the cost of tutoring, instructional materials, and tutor professional development when these services are tied to a student’s Individualized Education Program.
Notably, all of these federal funds are likely already being spent by districts, so shifting them to support tutoring will require trade-offs as they reconsider their priorities and invest in strategies most likely to have the greatest impact on student achievement.
Beyond direct funding, districts can leverage federally supported service and employment programs. AmeriCorps, a national service initiative funded primarily through federal appropriations, has long supplied tutors to low-income districts and schools through full-time programs like City Year and Reading Partners. And the federal work-study program provides federal funding to support part-time employment for undergraduate and graduate students, including those who tutor in K-12 schools. See a discussion of higher education’s role in tutoring below.
Finally, the U.S. Department of Education has finalized its Meaningful Learning Priorities, a regulatory framework for discretionary grant competitions. It will prioritize state and school district applications for competitive federal grants that propose implementing or expanding high-impact tutoring. This emphasis aligns with the Department’s FY 2025 Education Innovation and Research literacy grants, which include roughly $89 million recently awarded to seven state education agencies to scale tutoring programs. Arkansas, for example, secured $25 million for two initiatives that will implement tutoring in rural elementary schools, including one that uses AI-enabled tutoring.
State and Local Funding
States are playing a pivotal role in sustaining and scaling tutoring programs launched with federal ESSER funds by using funding formulas, policy mandates, and infrastructure supports to keep the post-pandemic tutoring movement going.
Many states have relied on short-term appropriations. Last August, Massachusetts approved $25 million in state funds for early literacy tutoring. Louisiana paired a K-5 tutoring requirement for low-performing students with an initial $30 million appropriation in the 2024–25 school year and another $30 million in 2025–26, though future funding will depend on annual legislative approval.
And while most state tutoring investments have been one-time commitments, Tennessee stands out for embedding tutoring in its K–12 funding formula by providing an additional $500 per fourth-grade student each year for literacy tutoring, making it an ongoing component of its school funding.
A few are testing new funding models. Indiana has adopted a pay-for-performance approach, contracting with private tutoring providers and compensating them based on measurable student progress. And some states have enacted tutoring mandates without funding them. Texas, for example, requires that students in grades 3-8 who failed the state assessment the prior year receive tutoring, but districts must use a combination of state, federal, and local funds to pay for it.
Twenty-four states offer infrastructure support—such as vendor lists or other procurement assistance—to help districts sustain tutoring.
Separately, a smaller number of states have statewide tutoring corps programs that recruit, train, and place tutors in schools. Funding and policy design of these programs vary by state. New Jersey’s tutoring corps, for example, operates through a nonprofit model supported by ongoing state grant funding and philanthropy. By contrast, the Maryland Tutoring Corps is embedded within the state education department, relying on a combination of expiring federal relief funds and support from local foundations, nonprofits, and city governments to sustain the program.
Local governments also support tutoring initiatives. Districts, cities, and counties sometimes offer competitive grants that can fund tutoring, and district leaders can reallocate existing dollars to support tutoring through the annual budget process. In cities with strong mayoral involvement in education, mayors can allocate tutoring dollars directly through the city budget. In Washington, D.C., for instance, the mayor dedicated roughly $5 million in 2024 to continue high-quality tutoring programs across traditional and charter public schools. Mayors in New York City and Nashville have also allocated local dollars to sustain programming as federal relief dollars expire.
Higher Education Partnerships
Colleges and universities represent a large, often underused source of potential low-cost tutors. According to Step Up Tutoring, a nonprofit organization that leverages college students and community volunteers as tutors, just some 10 percent of the nation’s college students could provide intensive tutoring to 25 percent of all public elementary school students. Institutions could help achieve that goal through strategic partnerships that offer federal work-study compensation, course credit, or other incentives to college students who serve as tutors.
In a 2023 letter, then-Secretary of Education Miguel A. Cardona encouraged cross-sector partnerships to scale tutoring and highlighted federal work-study as a key resource. That guidance remains the most recent federal direction on the use of federal work-study for tutoring, and there have been no regulatory changes since then. Under existing rules, as noted in the letter, when eligible college students tutor school-aged children, the government could cover up to 100 percent of their wages through federal work-study. EduTutorVA, for example, partners with Virginia colleges to place paid tutors in districts statewide, covering 40 percent of wages through federal work-study funds, with the remainder funded by philanthropy and a small district cost-share.
Teacher-preparation programs are also well positioned to expand tutoring capacity. At Bowling Green State University, for example, the largest teacher training program in Ohio, undergraduate education majors are required to serve as tutors in local elementary schools as part of their coursework. Tutoring training is embedded in existing pedagogy courses, so students are not taking any extra classes. Although the tutors are unpaid, their work counts toward their field-placement hours for graduation, giving them more than twice the 100 in-school hours required by the state, the most hours of any teacher-prep program in Ohio. There is no cost for participating public schools.
This model enables districts to sustain tutoring at little to no cost, while future teachers gain valuable classroom experience. Nearly 600,000 college students were enrolled in teacher-prep programs in the 2020-21 school year; if even half served as tutors, they could reach over one million K–12 students. Deans For Impact, a nonprofit focused on improving educator preparation, operates the Aspiring Teachers as Tutors Network, which supports teacher-prep programs in integrating tutoring into their undergraduate coursework.
Leveraging Philanthropic and Nonprofit Support
School districts can also partner with philanthropic and nonprofit organizations that work to sustain evidence-based tutoring. The Partnership for Student Success, launched as a public-private partnership during the Biden administration and now operating independently, offers free implementation support through non-profit partners like Accelerate and the National Student Support Accelerator. It also connects districts with vetted providers offering staffing, training, and financial assistance for tutors, helping reduce hiring, training, and program startup costs.
The upshot is that there are more sources of support for intensive tutoring in public schools than one might think. Tapping them may require education policymakers and practitioners to move money from other programs to fund tutoring. But with a large body of research showing increased student engagement and meaningful learning gains from high-quality tutoring done during the school day, that shouldn’t be a difficult decision to make.
A version of this piece originally appeared in The 74.