The preparation of all students for educational and career success benefits everyone, offers greater strength for our nation, and prepares students for global competitiveness. Today the Common Core State Standards demand that our nation’s students achieve success in the global competitive economy and have had a significant impact on education. Tutoring is a practical strategy to provide knowledge and skills that prepare students for achieving academic and lifelong success in the complex and ever-changing world of the twenty-first century. Although not all students require tutoring, it is an essential tool to heighten students’ academic accomplishment.

Tutoring is used across a number of academic domains and age groups and at all levels of schooling, including homeschooling, remedial programs, and special education programs, as a way of helping struggling students. High school students are the fastest growing group of consumers using tutoring, because of competition for college admission (Sullivan, 2011).

Today increasing numbers of students are entering higher levels of education unprepared. Students who seek admission to colleges and universities sometimes seek tutoring for the Scholastic Aptitude Test or American College Test. In other cases, college juniors seek similar assistance to help them prepare for admission tests to medical college or law school. In addition, colleges and universities across the nation recognize the need to tutor students who need assistance in mastering a course.

The Saint Paul Public Schools Foundation, Building Educated Leaders for Life, and 826 National are three programs that strive to institute best-practice after-school tutoring programs.

Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS) Foundation

The SPSS Foundation is an independent nonprofit organization that exists to mobilize resources to support student success in Saint Paul Schools, a school district that serves the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota. The state’s largest school district, it serves more than 38,000 students and employs more than 5,300 teachers and staff members.

SPSS Foundation serves as the bridge between the school district and the community. It also makes grants to teachers, schools, and community organizations and coordinates programs such as the Tutoring Partnership. The Tutoring Partnership is a citywide network of tutoring programs that provide students with academic support during and after school. In 2013, the Tutoring Partnership’s three main goals were to raise student achievement, improve tutoring program quality, and increase the quality of tutors through training.

In 2013-2014, the Tutoring Partnership had 900 tutors working with more than 6,700 students (Saint Paul Public Schools Foundation, 2014).

• Students in grades K−5 receiving literacy tutoring made 10−30 percent greater growth in reading, compared to similar students not tutored.
• Students in grades 6−8 receiving mathematics tutoring were 16 percent more likely to reach mathematics proficiency.

The SPSS Foundation contends that a best-practice tutoring program uses systematic evaluation to assess its impact on student outcomes and inform continuous improvement. The foundation strives to increase student success and improve the quality of tutoring by providing professional development, tutor training, and technical assistance to tutoring programs. To support this capacity building, the foundation created a research-based guide that is centered on best practices for tutoring programs for its partners and other community organizations. The guide contains evaluation approaches that tutoring programs at any level of development can use to better match program delivery to student’s needs, to create a lasting and powerful impact. Additional information on the SPSS Foundation is available at http://sppsfoundation.org/.

Building Educated Leaders for Life

Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) is a national nonprofit organization that serves scholars in kindergarten through grade eight in literacy and mathematics instruction in the United States. Led by Earl Martin Phalen and Andrew Lamar Carter Jr. in the early 1990s, a group of students at Harvard University in the Harvard Law School worked with parents, teachers, and experts to transform the lives of children who were unable to read, write, or perform mathematics operations at grade-level proficiency.

BELL refers to its students as scholars, to recognize their tremendous potential to excel. The BELL educational after-school program integrates best practices in academic tutoring, enrichment, and evaluation. The program aims to improve scholar’s academic performance, self-concept, and social/community skills. The program provides a thirty-week extended-day tutoring program with rigorous literacy and mathematics instruction, social enrichment activities, mentoring relationships, and parental engagement for African American and Latino boys.

Since BELL’s inception, the after-school programs have served more than 100,000 scholars in schools throughout the United States. During the 2013-2014 school year, BELL’s after-school program served 12,828 scholars. BELL works in California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and Ohio, and through a partnership with the Young Men’s Christian Association of the United States and its national network, BELL also serve scholars in Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, Texas, and Washington, DC (BELL, 2014).

BELL works diligently with principals and teachers to design and deliver after-school programs that align with school-day learning and priorities. BELL’s after-school program starts with a healthy snack followed by rigorous, small-group tutoring led by certified teachers and highly trained tutors. BELL’s staff uses research-based curricula aligned to the Common Core standards and applies data from computer-adaptive assessments to differentiate instruction and develop individualized learning plans according to scholars’ unique learning needs.

BELL lists these five principles present in each of its after-school program sites:

• High expectations
• Partnerships for success

• Exceptional learning environment
• Teaching excellence
• Relevant and engaging learning experiences

The 2012-2013 BELL’s after-school evaluation report revealed that scholars increased their percentile rank scores and positive normal curve equivalent (NCE) scores in their programs. Percentile rank scores provide a relative measure that compares BELL scholar performance to national norms. The positive NCE scores on standardized diagnostic tests indicate that BELL scholars gained new literacy and mathematics skills at a faster rate than their peers during the school year.

The evaluation report revealed that on average, scholars entered the BELL after-school program at the 33rd percentile in reading and the 27th in mathematics. After being in a BELL after-school program, scholars increased their percentile rank scores to an average of 37th percentile in reading and 33rd percentiles in mathematics. This information proves that BELL narrowed scholars’ achievement gap (BELL, 2013).

The 2013-2014 BELL’s after-school impact report indicated that scholars also increased their scaled scores in the program. Scaled scores are useful to compare scholar performance over time and are mathematically transformed from one set of numbers, such as a raw score, to another set of number to make them comparable. BELL scholars’ increased scaled scores suggest that partaking in after school tutoring programs improves the chances for a positive effect on student achievement.  Additional information on BELL is available at: http://www.experiencebell.org/.

826 National

In 2002, award-winning educator Nínive Calegari and award-winning author Dave Eggers founded 826 National in San Francisco. It is a network of nonprofit organizations. 826 National is the center of the 826 network and provides strategic leadership, administration, and other resources to ensure the success of its network of writing and tutoring centers. As of 2014, 826 National had seven centers in the United States located in San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Ann Arbor/Detroit/Ypsilanti, Boston, and Washington, DC.

826 National centers offer free after-school tutoring for students ages six through eighteen. In the 2013−2014 school year, 826 programs had 6,042 active volunteers, served 32,041 students and 917 teachers, and offered 1,924 after-school tutoring sessions. In addition to 826 National’s seven centers, more than twenty cities in the United States and fifteen international cities provide 826-inspired programming to students and schools in their communities (826 National, Inc. 2014).

The 826 National model is as follows:

• Commitment to Literacy. 826 National chapters provide students with high  quality,engaging, and hands-on literary programs.

• Project-Based Learning. Students at 826 National can become published authors. 826

National chapters publish hundreds of pieces of students’ work, to celebrate students’ hard work and showcase their results.

• Third Place. The concept of a third place was introduced by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in 1989. The third place, also referred to as third space, is the concept of a community building.
• Volunteer and Community Involvement. 826 National makes known that the force behind its efforts is attributable to its vast, dedicated, and hard-working network of volunteers and community members.

• Teacher and Classroom Support. 826 National’s goal is to be a resource to teachers through field trips, in-school programs, and specialized workshops.

826 National’s on-site and in-school programs are based on the idea that if creativity is celebrated, it engages and assists children. The 826 National office was established to serve the growing network of chapters by maintaining the brand, developing evaluation systems, coordinating national press and marketing initiatives, building a base of national supporters, ensuring programmatic quality and consistency, and overseeing replication of the 826 model.

In fall 2014, the Library of Congress awarded 826 National network the inaugural American Prize for Literacy. The Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program was created to support organizations working to alleviate the problem of illiteracy in the United States and worldwide. In particular, the initiative seeks to recognize organizations that have been doing exemplary, innovative, and easily replicable work over a sustained period of time.

Additionally, in December 2014, 826 National was featured in the holiday edition of O, The Oprah Magazine, as one of “11 Ways to Use Your Skills to Do Good.” Additional information for 826 National is available at http://www.826national.org.

Tutoring is used worldwide and is now commonly accessible through schools, colleges, universities, libraries, churches, community agencies, and public and private tutoring institutions, allowing all students the potential to achieve academic success in school. Tutoring formats that can be incorporated in a comprehensive tutoring program include one-to-one, home-based, peer, cross-age, small-group, online, volunteer, and after-school programs. Regardless of the tutoring format or its accessibility, tutoring is an investment in education and in the future of our nation’s students.

The SPPS Foundation, BELL, and 826 National exemplify some of the best practice after-school tutoring programs. These programs incorporate several of the effective components that researchers indicate are essential to successful tutoring programs, such as intensity, consistency, structure, and close coordination with teacher and classroom. Furthermore, these best-practice tutoring programs provide stakeholders with hands-on tools that contain practical strategies and resources that are high-quality and evidence-based.

About the Author

Andrea Nelson-Royes, EdD, is an educational researcher and author of Why Tutoring?: A Way to Achieve Success in School; Success in School and Career: Common Core Standards in Language Arts K−5; Transforming Early Learners into Superb Readers: Promoting Literacy at School, at Home, and within the Community; and PURR! A Children’s Book about Cats. Her articles have appeared in the Reading Improvement Journal and Illinois Schools Journal. Nelson-Royes holds a doctoral degree in educational and organizational leadership from Nova Southeastern University in Florida. She lives in the southeastern United States with her family. She can be contacted through her website at www.andreanelsonroyes.com.

References

Building Educated Leader for Life (BELL). 2013. Building Educated Leaders for Life 2012-2013 afterschool evaluation report. Retrieved from http://issuu.com/experiencebell/docs/bell_after_school_12-13_evaluation_/1?e=4625325/4833088.

Building Educated Leader for Life (BELL). 2014. Building Educated Leaders for Life 2013-2014 afterschool impact report. Retrieved from http://issuu.com/experiencebell/docs/about_bell_900b8551b7e94d.

Saint Paul Public Schools Foundation. 2014. Tutoring Partnership. Retrieved fromhttp://sppsfoundation.org/what-we-do/tutoring-partnership

Sullivan, M. 2011. Behind America’s tutor boom. MarketWatch Inc. Retrieved from http://www.marketwatch.com/story/behind-americas-tutor-boom-1318016970246.

826 National, Inc. 2014. 826 National: Writing, publishing, tutoring. Retrieved from http://www.826national.org/.