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It’s been one year since U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called on colleges to tap into Federal Work-Study funds to place more of their students in support roles — particularly tutoring services — in K-12 schools.
Signs of success are starting to emerge as more higher education institutions reveal growing interest among students to tutor in K-12 schools when they are compensated. Not only are colleges finding plenty of tutors, these often newer paid opportunities are also beginning to create pathways into diversifying the teaching profession, some tutoring research experts say.
And schools are directly seeing benefits to student success as a result of these tutoring partnerships.
College tutors in action
In 2018, Spelman College, a historically Black college for women, launched a high-impact literacy tutoring program in partnership with Atlanta Public Schools. Since then, the program known as SpelREADS has placed a total of 1,566 Spelman undergraduates in APS to work with 1,237 students in the district, said Jilo Tisdale, director of the college’s Bonner Office of Civic Engagement, which oversees SpelREADS.
On average, the elementary and middle school students who enter the SpelREADS program are 1 1/2 years behind their grade level reading, Tisdale said. After going through the program for one year, APS students are just slightly less than a semester behind in reading, Tisdale has found.
“The progress at which students at SpelREADS are closing the gap to grade level [reading] is accelerated by their participation,” Tisdale said.
SpelREADS pays undergraduates $300 per semester to individually tutor APS students for 3 hours per week, the program also provides free transportation for its undergraduates to consistently visit schools, Tisdale added. This semester, SpelREADS hired 60 total Spelman students to tutor across six different schools — often during the school day.
Tisdale added that it’s vital for the college to provide transportation, which she said costs about $100,000 per year to operate.
“There are some students who just couldn’t even consider doing it if transportation wasn’t provided,” Tisdale said. “One of the things that schools were most hesitant about in the beginning was the reliability of tutors.”
This is also the first year SpelREADS has tried to tap into Federal Work-Study program dollars to help bolster the tutoring program, but there have been challenges, she said.
Because SpelREADS only allows tutors to work 3 hours per week, it limits students’ ability to fully use Federal Work-Study funds, Tisdale said. On top of that, Spelman students cannot work multiple jobs to receive Federal Work-Study pay.
Another way Tisdale is considering working around this issue is to see if schools would allow SpelREADS tutors to help with other K-12 student support services, like in afterschool programs.
“What would really be helpful was if the Department of Education offered grants to support the other expenses of delivering high-quality, high-impact tutoring and mentoring,” Tisdale said. “The transportation is the piece that is really prohibitive.”
Paying tutors and expanding teaching pathways
Over the years, Tisdale said she knows of at least 13 undergraduates from SpelREADS who have decided to pursue a full-time teaching career as a result of being a tutor, though she says that’s likely an underreported figure since the program hasn’t closely tracked it.
Programs like SpelREADS “absolutely” help to diversify the teacher workforce, she added, because it opens up new compensated opportunities for students to actually explore the teaching profession firsthand.
Research released this month in a working paper from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute demonstrates how crucial pay is for recruiting tutors from colleges.
The study ultimately found that advertising monetary compensation for tutoring roles increased applications on college campuses by 196% compared to tutoring advertisements that did not push out pay messaging. As a result, students were also 205% more likely to be hired as tutors under monetary advertising for such roles.
As of May, 50 higher education institutions have pledged to be a part of the National Partnership for Student Success’ Higher Education Coalition, said Kate Cochran, NPSS’ managing director. Members include Arizona State University, Princeton University, Howard University and Virginia Tech.
NPSS is a public-private partnership spearheading the White House tutoring initiative to place 250,000 tutors, coaches and mentors in public schools by summer 2025 — and the group was already 75% of the way there as of September 2023.
As part of its Higher Education Coalition, colleges and universities pledge to set a two-year goal that they will use Federal Work-Study funds to hire college students into positions as tutors, mentors, student success coaches, post-secondary transition coaches, or wraparound student support coordinators at K-12 schools. Alternatively, they may also substantially increase the number of college students serving in those roles, no matter the funding source.
Another challenge with using Federal Work-Study to pay college tutors, Cochran said, is that sometimes students want to work more tutoring hours but are limited by their total Federal Work-Study award.
Regardless of the potential hiccups along the way, data has shown that colleges and universities are beginning to tap more into Federal Work-Study funds to hire tutors, said Nancy Waymack, director of research partnerships and policy at Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator, a nonprofit research organization that promotes high-impact tutoring in schools.
For Waymack, it’s refreshing to see students earn pay for tutoring considering the role has historically been viewed as a volunteering opportunity.
“Using Work-Study, using AmeriCorps funds, other federal resources or resources that come from other places to pay tutors just opens up the field a lot more for many different students who otherwise might have been doing another job on campus,” Waymack said. “And they wouldn’t have that opportunity to be in a school, work with kids, and see educators who are teaching every day that they might want to emulate somewhere down the road.”
At SpelREADS, there’s consistently been more student interest than available tutoring slots, and more schools want to participate — but the program can’t afford to expand, Tisdale said. Even so, she said she hopes to eventually expand SpelREADS to every APS school, if possible, by partnering with other local colleges.
Dive Awards
