Liz Cohen | The Future of Tutoring - Transcript
Jeremy Singer: [00:00:00] this will be wonderful. It's our first live version of this. Liz has written a fantastic book um, you know, this, all, the origin of all of this was I was running a small non-profit in the Bay Area and was struggling with, we were trying to work with schools to figure out what actually moves the needle in teaching and learning.
And it was hard to find things that worked. And at the time, George Lucas Education Foundation, which is now Edutopia, came out with a website that was gonna be a repository of all the things that work. And naively back then, I was like, oh, this is gonna solve it. There are all these things that work, it's just that people don't know about it.
And turns out, you know, if you look at it now, there's very few things that have worked in scale in education. So this is my venture into trying to talk to people who are experts and smarter than me about this to see what works. And you'll hear in a minute, but the mix of COVID and the ESSER funds created a a very unique opportunity.
So we're gonna start in a second. There's a lot of rich things [00:01:00] here.
And she's a true expert. And thank you, Liz, for joining.
Liz Cohen: Thanks for having me.
Jeremy Singer: So welcome to the education equation. We're trying something new here. We're live in New York City, just off Broadway, and we have a live crowd, so we will hear from the crowd now.
That was awesome. Thank you all. So our guest today is Liz Cohen. She has worked as an analyst and advisor for foundations, districts, and nonprofit organizations in the K 12 education space For nearly two decades. She began her career at the District of Columbia Public Schools office of Data and Accountability.
And then at the office of the state superintendent in dc. She's worked at Future ed, the Institute for Children, Poverty, and [00:02:00] Homelessness, the Urban Institute, and Whiteboard Advisors, as well as being a strategic data fellow at Harvard University's Center for Education Policy and Research. She's now Vice President of Policy at 50Can, a nonprofit network of local leaders advocating for high quality education for all students.
And most recently, and I think most importantly, why we're here today is she published a book, the Future of Tutoring, which is an insightful, data filled book that takes a sharp research based look at the many models of tutoring and their impact. Liz, welcome to the Education Equation.
Liz Cohen: Thank you.
Jeremy Singer: So I started the podcast to identify what actually works in education. And as a researcher, you've been asking that same question for much of your career. In this book, you argue convincingly that tutoring is one of the very few examples that have clearly improved educational outcomes. Our goal today is gonna dig deep into tutoring, not just the evidence, but also unpacking, tutoring, all the aspects of it, because it's such a broad and sometimes misunderstood [00:03:00] category.
But I wanna start by, um, acknowledging that educational research is really hard and it's next impossible to prove anything definitively. So thank you for dedicating your career to this field. Um, and one of the constant challenges I hear from researchers, it's very hard to find enough data that you can use.
So we're in that world, COVID hits, and in your book you call it an accidental experiment. So tell us why COVID was such a uniquely rich moment from an educational research standpoint, and what made it the perfect storm for researching on tutoring?
Liz Cohen: Sure. Well. We were, I think all of us there in 2020 and everyone started scratching our heads collectively, especially in K 12 education in that summer as it became clear that in many parts of the country, schools were not going to reopen.
We were already scratching our heads about what we were gonna do, about the loss of the last part of the 19-20 school year. And it was just this really remarkable thing where there was sort of these whispers that just sort of started in a variety of [00:04:00] places of maybe tutoring. Like we should probably think about tutoring.
It's tutoring is been around for a very long time, since Aristotle. Somebody joked that maybe the name of this book should be tutoring The second oldest profession.
Jeremy Singer: would've been a punchier title. Yeah. You
Liz Cohen: but, you know, tutoring is inherently.
Personal. And one thing that happened during COVID is that almost every child and every family had a slightly different experience and was gonna come back to the classroom with slightly different needs. So it made a lot of sense that this was sort of the response. so we started having these conversations, people saying, okay, we think we're gonna do tutoring.
What's that gonna look like? This is now fall 2020, and then the beginning of 21 at the start of the Biden administration. And President Biden announced is $129 billion for K 12 education on top of many billions that had already been given in the fall, in the first couple rounds of federal funding. But in this last big pot, he said, you know, you gotta use 20% of these funds to address learning loss in some way.
And, you know, I don't know how many of the folks here are, are in K 12, but having worked at both the district [00:05:00] and state level, um, nobody is set up to handle that amount of money pretty well, right? And so people were like, we gotta have something to do. It was a ripe environment for someone to say, here's a thing to do.
And so just the field I think really coalesced around this idea. There were a few researchers that really said we're gonna start providing evidence really rapidly. I think it's a really important part of the story is that it wasn't just that schools started saying, let's work with tutoring providers.
It was that researchers said, we're gonna create ongoing feedback loops of data and information as you're doing this. I mean, there have been dozens of white papers, case studies published by very established researchers in the last few years, specifically on tutoring. And so all of these things kind of work together to create this moment that we were just off to the races. Right. And this became the primary response. By May, 2023, 80% of school districts reported to the US Department of Education, they were offering some kind of tutoring program. And about two thirds of those were offering what we'll call high impact tutoring or high dosage tutoring, which is mostly what the book is [00:06:00] about.
Jeremy Singer: So you mentioned tutoring you know, sort of the second oldest profession, um, which I love.
I'd love to hear a little more of a brief history of how tutoring has intersected with education or been embedded in education and including in the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.
Liz Cohen: Sure. We'll start a little bit farther back. If you go back to the 19th century, even before the college board existed, there was a lot of tutoring that was primarily how mostly affluent white boys were prepared to go to university.
And then in the late 19th century, this is a brief history lesson, I promise, but as progressive education, reformers started thinking, should we democratize access to education in this country? And you can look back and folks like Horace Mann and John Dewey started saying, we gotta get away from this tutoring nonsense, right?
'cause we can never do it at scale. And so we really turned away from tutoring as a practice, and that worked out pretty well for us for a while. Uh, and then of course, in the last 70 years, let's say, we've been on a bit of a bumpier road, I think for public education. And one thing that's happened in that time, even before 2001, um, is the ongoing rise of private tutoring.
So if you talk [00:07:00] to families with means, they are routinely hiring all sorts of tutors for their kids all of the time. In 2001, with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress and those words bring back feelings for people who worked on this during that time can be triggering.
I used to have to calculate adequate yearly progress for DC schools. That was my job. So this was a big thing for me. Um, but one of the things they were required to do was to offer supplemental education services, which was essentially the opportunity for people to have afterschool tutoring. It totally bombed because there was no infrastructure, there was no additional funding set aside from this.
And we really didn't have actually very little evidence base of how to do this well and what it might uh, look like. And so that effort, you know, 24 years ago now really didn't get us very far with tutoring. I think it actually made people sort of turn away. See, we sort of tried it. It's not gonna work.
Didn't work, work.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Liz Cohen: Because the crazy thing, honestly is that if you look back, not that far before COVID in 20 14, 20 15, Roland Friar is a Harvard [00:08:00] economist. So Roland had a lot of the same questions that you do about what works in education. So he went to Houston and he said, we're gonna try this thing.
Let's test a bunch of stuff in Houston schools, all of the big interventions, small class sizes, things around teacher training, things around this, that and tutoring. And in 2015 published results where tutoring blew everything else out of the water. And nobody was talking, I never knew about that story and this is what I do.
I was working at that time. So, you know, , we've been on a bumpy road. Um, and then we got to COVID and we also invented this new thing. 'cause we had this new evidence base called High Impact Tutoring. And then we did it.
Jeremy Singer: Just did it. Yeah, no, it's great. And I agree, there's pretty good research prior to your book.
Um but it didn't pick up or didn't stick. And, we're both NBA fans and we talk about the fact that, you know, for a long time, uh, the three pointer was underutilized in the NBA and it took a while to realize, hey, a three pointer is more valuable than a two pointer.
Right? And now the whole game has changed maybe tutoring's at that stage some
Liz Cohen: people don't like it when the game has changed and they feel that play is different. Now, Michael Jordan is saying that
Jeremy Singer: it was better back in his day, um, uh,
Liz Cohen: [00:09:00] Michael Jordan still thinks he can beat everyone if he got on the court right now, so, yeah,
Jeremy Singer: I wouldn't bet against him.
Um, so impact, uh, most importantly, obviously this is what this pod, uh, focuses on. How are schools, how are districts, our state measuring success of tutoring? Sure.
Liz Cohen: So look, when you have an accidental experiment, like 10,000 school districts doing versions of the same thing at the same time, you're not gonna have consistent measurement. It really depends, is the answer. So like big district initiatives where the district's really trying to scale this in places like Baltimore, Ector County, Texas, handful of other places, you know, they're mostly looking at their uh, annual assessment, or they're looking at NWA map, you know, fall, spring.
But you get a lot of early literacy programs, especially if you're working K one early literacy, well, they're, you're not taking tests, right? So they're looking at often using DIBELS data, right? Which is an early literacy assessment and things like that. There's a lot of data across the board.
I mean, I've also been in schools where they just made up their own pre-post tests. We're gonna do tutoring for 10 weeks and these are the skills that we know fifth graders are missing. So the math. You know, interventionists made up a [00:10:00] test and they gave that pre-post
Jeremy Singer: for us at the College Board.
That's frightening. But go, go, keep going. Yeah.
Liz Cohen: I think when you're talking about like 14 kids in a pilot tutoring, I will embrace it from the perspective of I want folks to be looking at data that feels meaningful and actionable, uh, for them. Right now, we have trying to have a few sort of formal, uh, RCTs, randomized controlled trials sort of come out of this newer versions of tutoring.
Those are, um, but again, they're using a array of measures. 'cause it depends what it is that you're tutoring. A lot of tutoring has been early literacy. The tutoring movement also aligned with the Science of Reading movement and that has been a particular focus. So they needed to think about other measures there because we don't have state assessments.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. We'll get into it later likely, and I don't want to jump in now, but, you argue very convincingly that part of success is even just the adults involved and the students involved believing in the impact. , Um, give us, a couple examples of success with data and of the many things you looked at a lot of examples.
So
Liz Cohen: Yeah.
Jeremy Singer: Can you give us a.
Liz Cohen: Yeah, I'm actually, I'm gonna give you some new stuff that's not [00:11:00] even in the book because this is an ongoing, evolving field. So
Jeremy Singer: breaking news,
Liz Cohen: uh, uh, yeah. So in the, the District of Columbia, um, in both in DCPS and charter schools in dc, so last year in the 24 25 school year, they tutored about 9,000 kids and they're just releasing data.
Now that shows that those kids got about, uh, three additional months of this is math, tutoring of math. And what's great about that isn't just that these kids are getting more math. It's that in the previous year, the kids who did math tutoring got two additional months of math. And that's a whole additional month through implementation, through really thinking about, you know, tutor school match, who's the right partner for each school, and really paying attention to a lot of the details that I know we're gonna talk about.
Um, so it's not just that these kids are really getting meaningful, additional academic support, it's that the district is figuring out how to increase the amount that they're getting from the tutoring program.
Jeremy Singer: That's awesome. And the results of that. As far as performance or achievement?
Liz Cohen: Yeah. So overall, I mean, if you look on state assessments, [00:12:00] DC is on the rise. So they're feeling good. I mean, DC if you talk to DC right now, they'll say they're gonna be the first uh, urban district to close the achievement gap in math, and they believe that tutoring is the lever they're pulling to get them there.
So that's pretty exciting. That's pretty
Speaker 3: good. Yeah.
Liz Cohen: Yeah. Um, but there's lots of other stories like that too, at the district and school level, I mean in, uh, Guilford County, uh, North Carolina, which is the Greensboro area. Um, and they've done tutoring across grades, but they've, you know, really seen that their students are growing more So North Carolina, like a lot of states, North Carolina looks both at overall achievement, but also growth.
And they're seeing that their students who are in tutoring programs are achieving significantly higher growth levels
Speaker 4: Yep.
Liz Cohen: Than, uh, students who aren't in the tutoring. And also other districts in North Carolina that didn't take the big approach. Guilford's, one of the, uh, districts that really scaled the most, they got up to about 17,000 kids in high impact tutoring at the height in 23, 24.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. And, and the book has many, many, many great examples of success and, and interestingly, with a lot of different approaches that we'll get into. Yeah. So it's, it wasn't like, there's not [00:13:00] a magical one size fits all, you just mentioned, uh, uh, high impact tutoring, so let's define it for the, yeah.
For the listeners.
Liz Cohen: Okay. So we invented this new thing and gave it a name. I didn't invent it. Some other people gave it names and used evidence. Uh, so this is what it is. It's at least three times a week. For at least 30 minutes. No more than four students to an adult is the ideal ratio. Uh, and a consistent adult, right?
So that it's every time you are the tutor, not that there's a rotation of tutors. Um, and that ideally the, uh, material that is being covered in tutoring is pretty closely aligned with, uh, what the student is learning in class. And I say ideally because I think this is the piece, some tutoring folks feel really strongly that it has to be aligned.
I think there's some flexibility, particularly in younger grades, um, where you can have alignment, but different curricula for tutoring and, uh, uh, classes. Right.
Jeremy Singer: So, we'll, we'll get into the alignment. I also think some people say the materials only should be whether high quality instructional materials.
But some version of that is sometimes. I see. Yeah. Yeah. So we're gonna try something [00:14:00] new. Um, we are calling the truth O meter. Uh, , um. And this could fail miserably, but we're gonna try it. Uh, we're gonna talk about a lot of aspects of tutoring, and we have a, uh, a thermometer that has five, which is the best.
And it's, the data is, uh, it's hot and it's proven. Uh, four is, it's warm, but could benefit from more data. Three is moderate with mixed results. Two is cold and no evidence, and one is freezing. And actually there's evidence on the contrary to this thing. So we're gonna use that scale. We're gonna try this, we're gonna do it, doing it live right off Broadway.
We love truth. Uh, okay. So when we talk about tutoring, I'm gonna go through a bunch of different variables. So what does the data say on the difference between one-on-one versus one to small group kind of situation?
Liz Cohen: I mean, I, we'll go five. Okay. In that I think there's clear data that one-on-one is gonna get you better results than.
One or four. Yeah, yeah. Then one on four. Actually there's just literally a new study that came out on this in the last few weeks showing that the time on task in the tutoring session [00:15:00] is higher for one-on-one versus two-on-one, two-on-one also, the tutor ends up spending more time talking than the students. Uh, one thing we spend a lot of time looking at is sort of the tutor talk ratio, um, because we wanna make sure the students are actually doing the engagement.
Um, but I will say that that five, the caveat is it's more expensive to do one-on-one. Right. So when we talk, I know we're gonna talk about cost, but uh,
Jeremy Singer: yeah, that's gonna be the bottom line. A lot of this, the right, maybe the best is, uh, uh, just, uh, not affordable, but, so let's say then to that spirit that, um, it is a small group.
It's three or four students to tutor. Um, is there a difference between 2, 3, 4? Is there any data that supports that?
Liz Cohen: Um I think it's a three because I think you could, I'm not sure there's explicit data. I think it's easy to extrapolate from existing evidence that fewer is going to be better.
Jeremy Singer: Right, right, right. Yeah. Great. Um, so then there's virtual tutors versus in person. Um,
Liz Cohen: we'll go with five 'cause we have great evidence that it doesn't matter. Um, we
Jeremy Singer: heard some surprises in the world.
Liz Cohen: This is like one of my favorite facts about tutoring because of course, right.
Again, [00:16:00] coming out of 2020 and the disaster of what I now like to call emergency remote learning to distinguish from, I think, real virtual learning and virtual tutoring now. And I just wanna say I have three kids in school, so I also did this as a parent, it was bad. It did not work.
the truth on the truth of meter is that we have studies now that show that virtual tutoring, you can get the same effects.
Um, they actually did a study right here in New York City, uh, the tutors were from cuny. It was an early reading program, and they looked at a variety of things, including whether it was virtual or in person and other characteristics of the college student tutor. The modality did not make any difference.
And I think this is tremendously important, and I have watched this myself. So for the book, I visited 19 schools in seven states and DC I did a lot of other interviews too. But I have seen this virtual tutoring happening and I think that it's clear. And anyone who works with kids or has kids know, kids are very comfortable with technology.
They are comfortable creating a relationship with someone over a screen. [00:17:00] This actually feels more normal to them than it probably does to us. Uh, and they create real relationships with their tutors. They're excited to participate in their tutoring sessions, and the whole thing really works and it opens a lot of doors to who can tutor access all of that.
Jeremy Singer: So, I always imagine, uh, virtual of student in front of their laptop or their iPad with a tutor. But, um, there's more to it like describe some of the virtual tutoring environments you saw.
Liz Cohen: There's a few ways to do it. I have sat in a cafeteria where there's groups of three kids, but they're actually totally different spots in the cafeteria, but they're all logged into the same zoom call with a tutor, uh, which, if you've ever tried to manage large groups of kids, sometimes you might wanna like that.
I've seen it where you have more than one kid sitting in front of the same screen with a virtual tutor on the other screen. Um, uh, I've, you know, seen a lot of iterations of it. Uh, but for the most part it's just, it's not that different really from you know, all of us being on a Zoom call.
Jeremy Singer: Right, right. And one thing that you described in your book was, um, sometimes there's someone in the [00:18:00] classroom, the teacher, someone walking around, describe how that can work so
Liz Cohen: that that part's. Important. Again, if you know anything about classroom management is you want an adult wherever the kids are.
Um, and usually this is the classroom teacher. , Uh, so Teach For America launched a tutoring program, uh, called TFA Ignite, uh, which has really taken off beyond even TFAs expectations. Yeah, it really, it started in Arizona because the TFA executive director in Arizona was talking to schools in her area in 2020 and said, what do you need?
They said, we think we're gonna need some tutors. Could you help us? And she was like, I'll try to work on this. And now she runs a national tutoring program.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Liz Cohen: Um, but what they, their model is they actually pay the classroom teacher a stipend to not only oversee the kids during tutoring, but to provide some light touch oversight and management to the college tutors themselves, checking in with them, making sure they have the materials that particular program uses
whatever curricular materials the school has, so the teacher becomes the conduit, but they pay the teacher, uh, maybe, I think it's like $2,000 over the 10 weeks that they're running the tutoring program every day. Yeah. So that is a big part and that
Jeremy Singer: helps keep [00:19:00] time on task and things like that.
Yeah. Um, real quick, uh, anything with data on showing certain ages or academic subjects that are more proven to work with tutoring than not?
Liz Cohen: Uh, I don't know exactly what angle I've take on this. I guess I would say five that it's hot and proven that tutoring works at all ages. Okay.
That's the beauty. It's endlessly flexible. That's good. And we can make it work for everyone.
Jeremy Singer: And any math versus reading and writing? Is there a
Liz Cohen: Not in terms of potential effect size. Okay. Um, we see big effects on all sorts of subjects. Um, both reading and math. We have a lot of evidence for, uh, and with paid tutors and volunteer tutors and all sorts of different kinds of things like that.
Um. There's other usually implementation factors that make it more or less, which is mostly right, like if, so some people call high impact tutoring, high dosage tutoring. And it's true that the dosage is actually like really important. Yeah. So if you're not getting kids to enough sessions, they're not gonna get the effect.
And it often gets harder to get them to the sessions as they get older.
Jeremy Singer: Yep. Uh, but this is good news I think for our listeners 'cause it means, work independent of the academic subject, independent of the age it can work. Yeah. Um, you got into this a little bit and we have people in this [00:20:00] room and listeners who were responsible for the school master schedule.
And I think one of the things that came out was it's optimal to be embedded in the school day, not as a weekend or after school things. You just get better performance and it needs to be done sort of strategically. Um, can you share some models you saw where it was done really well and embedded in the school?
Liz Cohen: Yes. But before I do that, I wanna just sort of take one step back to make a big picture point, which is that one of the reasons that I wrote this whole book about tutoring isn't just because I care about tutoring. It's because one of the ongoing critiques I think of public education is that it's really hard to make change, that we don't do a good job of embracing innovation and that there are all these immovable pieces of the system.
And one of the things that I think is truly inspiring and incredible about the work that's happened around tutoring is that schools and districts have been willing to make those big changes that nobody thinks that we can. And one of those things is around scheduling, and another is around staffing and all sorts of other things, but on the scheduling.
And I think that this is a story I want people to know that we can do big hard things and [00:21:00] I want us to know that we can do big, hard things. That's a great
Speaker 3: thing. Yeah. So.
Liz Cohen: Among the big hard things, right? So elementary schools is the easiest and a lot of this tutoring has been in elementary schools, and the best way to do it is that you build in an intervention block, which some schools already have, and that becomes sort of the dedicated tutoring time.
And everyone during that block, either the whole grade or sometimes the whole school is either in tutoring or some other sort of small group activity. I have seen schools where everyone is doing tutoring. I have seen schools where, because of resource constraints, some kids are doing tutoring, a small group is working with the teacher.
You know, maybe a small group is doing some acceleration work through some EdTech program or something like that. There's different ways to kind of slice and dice, but that's the primary way to do it, is just really create a dedicated time in the day and shift the whole schedule around that.
Jeremy Singer: it's a great takeaway. That's an important piece.
Another key piece is alignment, and we've talked about a little bit the tutorings aligned to the curriculums, instructional materials to assessments. Again, give us an example of a best practice where there, I mean, everyone will say. Duh Right to that, but like, give us a good example of where that you, you saw that really [00:22:00] working.
Liz Cohen: So again, I wanna say like with all things, tutoring is a tool that you wanna use in service of a strategy. And so, if you just do tutoring because you heard it's really great, it's probably not gonna get you as far as if you are very clear on our goal for, you know, just to use DC Again, our goal is to close the achievement gap.
We're gonna use tutoring as a tool to do that. So we're gonna develop, what they've done in DC is they actually develop their own math tutoring curriculum to address, knowing their own standards and where they see based on test score data and other pieces, like what kids really need support with.
And then they're using that curriculum to do it. So that is one way to do it. Yeah. Um, most
Jeremy Singer: direct probably.
Liz Cohen: Yeah. Uh, and another way to do it, I mean, again, with the early literacy, um. There's variety of ways to measure kind of how kids are doing in early literacy. And especially I think in states, for instance, that now have third grade retention laws, there's a lot of emphasis in second and third grade on making sure that kids are gonna be able to pass their grade and go on to fourth grade.
So how you align the tutoring to the kind of literacy skills they're gonna need for the test [00:23:00] then kind of gets you where you wanna go because your goal is to keep kids moving on when they're actually prepared to do so. Um, and then you use tutoring as your lever to do that.
Jeremy Singer: Got it. That's great. Um, so, uh, embedding alignment.
Uh, another key thing is, uh, the reception by the school, the teachers, the whole program. Sure. And, I have a 24-year-old daughter who got her master's in social work and she had two practicums, both in schools. And in one practicum, she would go to the school and they really sort of treated her like an outsider and um, she didn't have a great experience.
And then the other one. She loved it. They treated her like a peer, and, and they were glad to have her. And, and she was involved with middle school students and that inspired her really. And she's now in education. You know, so it's obvious that we want these tutors to be received by a virtual in person, by the teacher's.
Like how do you set that up? Like, if you're a superintendent, you're a principal instructional leader, how do you get the teachers on board and they don't see this as a uh, competing factor or something, right. Different, particularly when they're outside tutors who may not have the same, uh, credentials as the [00:24:00] teachers.
Liz Cohen: Look, every school building is an organization has its own organizational culture and you gotta figure out how to navigate it. But another kind of wild part of the story for me is just that tutoring's very popular and it's very popular with teachers. And then usually that's because at least in the places I've been, the teachers, there's two things.
One is, okay, so we had COVID schools shut down, kids came back. The spectrum of needs in every classroom, pretty much in America got wider. And the spectrum of behavioral issues and all this stuff, right? So if you take that and we know, right? You can look at all sorts of teacher survey data. It's tough out there right now.
Teacher satisfaction is low in all these pieces and you say, okay, we're gonna bring in this thing that is going to explicitly address the things you are saying are gonna make your job harder and we're gonna do it in a way that we hope is going to make the rest of your job also easier. Uh, it turns out people like that.
Uh, that's one part of it. But I also think there's ways to create opportunities for both school and teacher kind of ownership. I think in Ector County, uh, in West Texas, they did a really nice job with this in a few different ways. One is that at the district level, so [00:25:00] when then superintendent Scott Murray said, okay, we're gonna do this big tutoring initiative.
And they put out an RFP got vendors that got it down to five vendors and they invited every principal in the district to, if they wanted to, to attend, uh you know, FAQ interview call with the vendors. And then they were able to sort of rank order their preference. Ultimately, they chose two vendors.
And then the district said, if you're participating in the tutoring program, you can pick which of these two vendors. So principals were sort of brought along for the process and had a voice in it. And then with the vendors, there was also optionality that both the principal could choose how they wanted their teachers to interact, but teachers ultimately were allowed to choose.
Do you wanna send material directly to the tutor? Or do you want the tutor to use these materials that we've already created? Aligned with, in this case, Texas State Standards? About a quarter of the teachers in Ector County opted to send their own materials. The other three quarters didn't. But it's things like this that just show, I think it helped teachers feel, okay, they're taking this seriously, not foisted upon that.
Yeah. They're treating me as a professional, it's gonna [00:26:00] be an add-on for me. And then they paid a lot of attention to implementation.
Jeremy Singer: Yep.
Liz Cohen: And then the teachers really liked it.
Jeremy Singer: That's great. Um, we talked about some of the challenges. You mentioned probably the biggest challenge is expense, right?
there's no question if you could have one to one verse one to 25 for every student, um, the outcomes would be better. Uh, you know, and you mentioned private tutors, hundreds of dollars per hour. Um, so ESSER funding came in with massive amount of money. Sort of pause that challenge for a bit.
Now ESSER funding is done. So as you think of it, like, um you know, when something's expensive but effective, there's different ways to approach this. One would be, um, figure out ways to reduce the cost. And there, there's a federal work study where you can get people in college who are getting paid to do this.
Um, although that, that sounds like uh, here's less of that. Uh, you could use AmeriCorps, you could use sort of less expensive tutors. You could potentially use technology. We'll get into ai. Um, you could also more hyper-focused on fewer students. Um, so like, if you think of all the factors and you were advising a superintendent or, uh, someone who's trying to, implementing a program that they [00:27:00] can afford to do for a long period of time. Which of those elements would you tell 'em to focus on, and how would you navigate that?
Liz Cohen: Wow. There's a reason I'm not a superintendent, I don't wanna make these choices. But, uh, again, to take a step back, we spend a lot of money on a lot of programs in education, a lot of interventional programs, a lot of, you know, all these MTSS and RTI and all these different pieces that we already do.
And a lot of those, uh, programs, in some places they may work and in a lot of cases they don't work or we don't have great evidence. So one thing I would say again, is like, what's your big picture plan? Where are you trying to go and what are the tools that you have evidence for? I don't think everyone should do tutoring again to do tutoring.
I think that if you're looking for an evidence-based tool and you don't feel like you have one, this is a great one. Uh, so there's that piece of it. All of these things are true. There's the, how's the field trying to make tutoring more efficient. So right now it's like usually something like 12 to $1,400 a kid over a year to get this kind of high impact tutoring. Um, now there are folks actively [00:28:00] piloting right now some programs where the tutoring goes down to two days a week. Uh, the other days are a computer adaptive, computer assisted program. Yeah, there was a study on this pre COVID with uh, algebra one tutoring that actually got the same results.
Uh, got about a year's worth of additional math, uh, with a four day a week in-person tutoring. And then when they replaced half the tutoring with computer adaptive, they actually got the same result. And now there's a, right now piloting the same approach, but with an early literacy tutoring. And, uh, it's not done yet, but I was talking to the person, they said the data look really positive, so if we crack that code, it's gonna drop the cost.
So there's how is the field making it more efficient? Uh, and then there's I mean, look, I know this isn't how budgeting actually works, but I guess my thing on this is. It doesn't serve kids if we pass them on from grade to grade without the requisite skills. Right. This is as true for reading as it is for math.
This isn't about blame, but it's really about we need to probably think differently about how we allocate funds because if we're stuck in second grade with kids who can't read [00:29:00] and aren't mastering basic facts, and then you end up at one middle school that I've been spending time with in DC and I visited for the book, and I've gone back a few times.
I mean, this year that principal, almost every single sixth grader in her, this is like the lowest income middle school in dc. Every single sixth grader came in at a third grade level or lower in reading and math. She literally spent the first three weeks of the year taking her teachers to high performing elementary schools to learn how to teach elementary skills.
Wow. No middle school principal should be doing that. So that's where we need a system wide approach of like, we gotta think differently about this. Yeah. Yeah. Um, the other piece I would say is um, and I wrote a whole chapter about contracts 'cause that's sexy and cool. Uh, but I even read
Jeremy Singer: that chapter just for the record.
Liz Cohen: Thank you. Um, but there has been a lot of innovation with using outcomes based or performance based contracts in tutoring, which allows the district to retain some amount of the money if you don't get the results that you're hoping for. Yeah. And I think that's a really important tool that I would encourage superintendents and other leaders to leverage.
Yeah, that's great. It requires more work. Put the money in your mouth. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It [00:30:00] requires more work for sure on the front side, but if you don't get where you wanna go and you're left with a hundred thousand dollars that you can use for something else, like maybe that upfront work is worth it.
Yeah.
Jeremy Singer: I, I have a friend who's a tutor and he wanted to do that. He's had such great results, but he said he'd start talking to families and said, uh, you know, I'll do it on a, you know, performance basis. And they thought it was weird and it is like, thought there was something bad about it.
But I think that is a, a great way to do it. I also. Um, there's definitely something, you know, with healthcare, there's been all the research of like healthy eating and certain interventions early. Yeah. Save massive amounts later before someone gets ill and so forth. So I really do like your, your idea of is there a way to do the equivalent of by not getting 'em to grade level by not imparting, uh, the success early.
We're digging ourselves as a society a bigger hole, which then either at the federal or state level, maybe we figure out a way to fund it. , Um, But, um, there's
Liz Cohen: a lot of kids who get, for instance, in late elementary, early middle, there are kids who get diagnosed with disabilities and end up with an [00:31:00] IEP. Some of them have real disabilities and some of them were never taught. and we don't do a good job of distinguishing between that.
And of course all kids should get the services they need. But also if we did a better job at the early years, I think that there could be huge savings recouped. Yeah. Hundred percent. If you look at special ed like spending, when a lot of times we're actually just finally trying. It's really different though, to teach a seventh grader who we never taught to read or do math effectively in the early grades.
Then they're gonna end up with a whole host of other issues. I'd rather us focus on really nailing the early stuff and then kind of see how I think that could really yield some savings over time. Yeah, I'd love
Jeremy Singer: to work with you to make that case. Um, so we mentioned sort of on the side AI and that is really promising.
The study you mentioned where part of it is um, uh, done not by a live tutor. Um, so you, you started writing this book and really AI wasn't a big factor. Now it's the world's changed dramatically in a short amount of time. Uh, but what do you think, you know, early on, and obviously anyone making predictions, it's tough in this space, but what do you see AI doing that can go better than humans can do?
Or is there anything right now?
Liz Cohen: Okay. [00:32:00] Better is relative. Uh,
I was on the train this morning. Yeah. Coming up to off Broadway. Uh, from DC but anyways, and I was talking to the guy next to me and he was asking me also about, he said, well, can't we get AI to just, to do this better?
Because it seems like we're gonna have these great avatars and kids won't even know that they're not talking to a human. And I, I actually do think that's possible, and I'm gonna answer your question more fully. I'll just say that my answer to him or my response was, I don't know if we want that. I do like to retain some humanity in the humanity part.
Um, but I do think that AI is gonna do a lot in tutoring specifically. First of all, because of the success we're having in virtual tutoring, there are a lot of really impactful tools currently being built and piloted that are essentially AI tutor coaches. And as someone who right now, like my bias on this is that I'm pro-human tutoring at the moment.
I love the idea of how we use AI to help tutors be better tutors while they get to maintain that human relationship. Yeah. And there was a small study done. Um, it was actually done on a chat-based [00:33:00] tutoring platform that went outta business, but the study remains and the data are true. Uh, which is that they built, uh, the folks at Stanford, built an AI tutor coach used it with this tutoring program.
It essentially took out the entire learning curve of being a first year tutor. Because it would prompt the tutor to say, okay, the student gave this answer. Here are two questions you could ask to help them understand. Right? Think about all the things. I don't know if folks you know here, if you, Jeremy, have spent time in the classroom, but like there's all these questions that can help students get there themselves versus Yep, yep.
And all that. So I think I'm really excited about that. There's some really great work being done on that right now. I do think it's not hard to think that in the next five years we're gonna have some pretty great real AI tutor options. I've been talking about it as sort of a opportunity for tutoring differentiation.
I can pretty easily envision a world in which there's a pretty low cost AI tutor that you could give every kid in your class. And for some number of those kids, it'll be enough to help them have that [00:34:00] individual time, even just to bring up early literacy again, one thing we know is that kids need more time practicing reading and that's,
there's some evidence that this is why maybe we don't do a great job with early reading because in our current classroom structure, it's hard for kids to get the practice that they need. Right? Right. If you can put them on with an AI program who can help them practice, correct them correctly, all of these pieces, that's pretty great.
It's gonna help some number of kids, and there will be some number of kids who need a human hand, virtual or otherwise to hold, uh, and walk them through. And so I, that's kind of how I'm thinking about it.
Jeremy Singer: No, it's great. I'm super bullish about this actually. not necessarily of zero human, but if technology can help better train tutors and then provide some of the supports to students so that the tutor time is even more focused.
And we're seeing this with teaching today, like some of the tasks that teachers had to do, preparing lessons plan grading, if technology can help them do that effectively or more efficiently, that gives more time for instruction or relating to the student, which is great.
Liz Cohen: Yep.
Jeremy Singer: Um, so in the intro of your book, and we've gone through this, uh, uh, you mentioned another, uh, a large [00:35:00] scale intervention that has had some success.
This is not 'cause she's here at college board, that's not a paid advertisement. Uh, but you mentioned advanced placement. Sure. And, uh, we have researchers in the room on our advanced placement team. No pressure here. Uh, but you had some experience at DC schools with ap.
So tell us, you know, your story and view and the AP.
Liz Cohen: So the number one question in general I get asked in in the education field about tutoring is, can we scale? This has been the sort of a debate from the very beginning in 2020 of people saying it's nice, everyone wants to do tutoring, we'll never be able to scale.
So in talking with folks about like, is there anything that we have scaled? Um, the one answer is AP and I think that it's indisputable that the AP program has successfully scaled across the country, although I think there are still high schools that don't have maybe all the same access, and virtual also has been a big part of this.
Yeah, I was just looking up in my own district that, you know, our school offers these classes, but there's other ones you can do that are approved online and all these different pieces. So I think AP has scaled remarkably well and I think there's a lot that tutoring can learn from that. And I think that [00:36:00] when you look at AP now and the fact that you have all these researchers in the room and all these people who work on it, the lesson for me at least is that implementation never ends.
And that while AP has created a lot of opportunities for kids to have access to a standardized, rigorous, high school course experience that they wouldn't have otherwise. There's also kids who end up in AP courses who are totally unprepared. You can see that, you know, in DC, no question. We used to publish all these data and you could see their schools were like, no kids were getting above a two on the AP exam. So then you just have to ask the question like, well, what's happening there? Right? Is it that the kids are coming in unprepared? Is it that the teacher, you know, isn't getting through all the material because of, say, chronic absenteeism or behavioral issues in the classroom?
Like it's not a, I don't think it's a flaw in the AP design. I think it's real world implementation, never ever stops being hard. Yeah. And so I think there's lessons also for if tutoring wants to hold up AP and I think they should. I think there are lessons to be learned from where AP [00:37:00] still has room to grow. That tutoring can think about, like how do we continue to grow and expand and hope that every student who experiences tutoring in the way, I think that folks think that hope that every student who experiences AP gets the same experience, even if we have some data that say. Maybe it doesn't.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree.
I think one of the benefits of ap, another benefit is that we have a standardized exam at the end, right? And so then we can see where, you know, students aren't achieving at the same level. I would argue it's more of a fundamental inequity of the system result. But then we can try to figure out is it an implementation issue?
How do we get students so they're more ready when they enter that AP class to be successful, so forth. Right. So we are almost outta time, so I'm gonna ask you, I always ask a series of rapid fire questions to my guest. Uh, the first is, I'm ready. What's the one education buzzword you wish we could retire?
Liz Cohen: Equity.
Jeremy Singer: Equity. Okay. Uh, uh, what's your favorite book on education? And you can't say your own, which I would say, but,
Liz Cohen: uh, it's The End of [00:38:00] Education, which was written in 1995 by Neil Postman.
Jeremy Singer: Alright, I have not read that.
That's great. You should it. The first one in this series I've not read. Uh, name one thing that makes you bullish for future learners.
Liz Cohen: Humanity will always invent something new. Humanity is awesome.
Jeremy Singer: All right. And, uh, uh, what one class you wish all students had to take? And that could be high school, college.
Liz Cohen: Yeah.
Well, I am, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this here, but I went to an IB high school and I would say it's this class I had to take called the Theory of Knowledge. And I still to this day think about some of these big philosophical questions. Like if I picture a tree in my head and you picture a tree in your head, are we talking about the same tree and what is the point of language?
And these like really big things in sitting. I spend a whole year in this class having to grapple with big philosophical issues. And I still think about it now 30 years later. Wow.
Jeremy Singer: Um, that's, that's awesome. I have not heard of that. Uh, so thank you. Uh, before we engage our live audience, uh, the last question I have for you is, uh, if you could wave a magic wand and make one insight from your book shape education [00:39:00] policy, what would it be?
Liz Cohen: We can follow the evidence and give kids what they need and believe that our system can be different than it is.
Jeremy Singer: Oh, I love that. Um, thank you for those inspiring words. So thank you, uh thanks for writing this wonderful book. Um, and now it's the audience turn to get in. Um, I ask you, uh, raise your hand.
We'll give you a mic, and then please introduce yourself and ask your question to Liz.
Jennifer Riordan: Hi, I am Jennifer Rodan from Homewood Flossmore High School. It's a south suburb of Chicago. And um, as I was listening to you talk, do the majority of schools who use high impact tutoring programs use college students with these or do they use teachers.
Liz Cohen: There's a lot of diversity, uh, and there's not a consistent approach.
So there's a lot of work using college students 'cause there's a lot of college students out there. Uh, uh, in the last five years, I would say almost any kind of person you can think of has worked as a tutor in one of these tutoring programs. And that includes current teachers, retired teachers, stay at home moms, general retirees, college students, high school students, recent college grads, uh, volunteer people who are just full-time [00:40:00] professionals.
All of those people have worked in these programs.
Jeremy Singer: And I think your, your book does a great job of, you know, one is near peer. There's some arguments for that, but there's also, uh, like college students, you can potentially get federal work studies so they can get paid through that. So it makes it more affordable.
Uh, a AmeriCorps, um, TFA, there's a lot of angles to find people and not pay 'em quite what you'd have to pay
Liz Cohen: one place where we often see teachers, it's hard to use teachers if you're trying to do it in school day. Uh, Uh, there's some models that have done it.
Um, one thing I am more bullish on, I was gonna say this earlier, but I forgot, I am more bullish on now than actually when I was writing the book is on the Promise of afterschool tutoring, and I'm really excited about this. I think that we are really seeing some progress in figuring out how to use that afterschool time.
The biggest issue is usually that it's hard to get kids there or it's hard to get them to commit. Um, but I don't know whether it's because parents are starting to be open to the idea of wanting their kids in these kinds of tutoring programs, but there's some really exciting work happening in the afterschool space.
Some of that uses teachers. In Louisiana. Uh, they offer actually a [00:41:00] tutoring voucher in Louisiana for $1,500 for kids who are performing below grade level can apply for this. And the biggest provider uses teachers. They never tutor their own students. They get assigned other students from their school, but they get to build on the kind of teacher family relationship that already exists and they're having a lot of success with that model.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, that's great. Other questions?
Clinton Alexander: Hi, my name is uh, Clinton Alexander. I'm from home of Smo High School. We're in the south suburbs of Chicago. And I wanted to ask you, when doing the research of high impact tutoring, what were the variables that caused the most impact? Because like if you did the research on a site that didn't have a viable curriculum that was guaranteed, the alignment wouldn't really, right.
It wouldn't really align. And so like what was the biggest variable that you noticed the greatest impact within the high impact tutoring?
Liz Cohen: So the, the cluster of pieces that make up the core definition, which is that you actually get at least. So we're talking really at least 90 minutes a week, um, with a consistent [00:42:00] adult in that same small group.
Uh, those are the things that together, you really have to have, there's some fungibility and flexibility on all the other pieces. You gotta get them the time with the dedicated adult. Um, and then you're, much more likely to get where you need to go.
Jeremy Singer: Great. Um, we need someone not from the suburbs of Chicago to ask a question.
Uh, Uh,
David Ryan: Um, David Ryan, superintendent in the southwest of New Hampshire. You had me at contracts. um, I'm really interested in, did you run across, in your evidence any of the liabilities that may exist in terms of like a malpractice situation where tutors run a foul or the achievement isn't there, or where students actually perform less?
Liz Cohen: I don't think I saw much where students performed less.
I mean, the liability, all that stuff is, everyone's getting a background check. Uh, all those pieces are sort of still in place in terms of typical liability protection. The biggest piece that's really different around the outcome space is that it requires the district or school and the vendor to agree this is how much [00:43:00] progress we think we can make. So it's usually set up as a tiered, you get some portion as a base payment, right? Uh, and I literally walked through real examples in the book, but let's say it's $700 or something, usually base payment. You're gonna get that no matter what.
Then you can set it up in a few ways. You could have a proficiency and a growth. You could have a, this amount of proficiency or an extra amount of proficiency. And so that if the student hits those benchmarks that are agreed upon in the contract on assessments, that the uh, district gives, then the tutor gets paid more.
And the district side of things is that the district has to guarantee the kid shows up for a minimum number of sessions. So the district has skin in the game too, because there's the base payment and there can sometimes be things around if your kids aren't showing up, uh, but, there's an entire group now called the Outcomes based Contracting Group at the Southern Education Foundation, although they actually work nationally now advising districts on how to set up these contracts. Um, I think they're, they're really impactful and, and really invite us to think differently about how we spend money in [00:44:00] education.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. And, and think the virtual tutors, the advantage there is they're not coming into the school. So there's, from a safety, some people are more comfortable with that. Other questions?
Emily Blatter Boyer: Hi, I am Emily Blatter Boyer. I work at the college board and oversee hiring. And I'm curious if you could talk to us a little bit more about the preparation of tutors. I know you mentioned the value that AI can play in their training. What else have you learned?
Liz Cohen: So, I'm laughing 'cause as you said this, I was flashing back to the folks from Guilford County who said, well, we spent our, most of our first year, um, feeling like we were in HR department when we were trying to run a tutoring program.
It's really hard. And, and Guilford is a place where they hired all in person. Uh, that was a priority for them. Uh, quite a few retired teachers and other folks like that. Uh, so the training depends a little bit on if you're building your own program or if you have a vendor. A lot of vendors will have their own training, um, and things like that.
Uh, we've seen a wide array of this. Um, you know, you need at least some amount of training, eight to 10 hours sometimes it can be more than that. You want some kind of check-in point. Especially the virtual tutoring, especially [00:45:00] with college students, most folks, either the vendor or if there's a classroom teacher being paid to oversee, will actually pop in to everyone's session at least once a week.
'cause you want that kind of uh, oversight. So you can provide ongoing feedback just as you would in any other kind of situation. Um you know, and then we have kind of the AI piece of it that we're building as we go on this. Um, uh, so the answer is there's some amount of training.
Uh, a lot of it can be I don't wanna say plug and play because nothing about running programs in schools is ever truly plug and play. But the reality is that if you say to a tutor, here's the curriculum, here are the problems that the kids need to work on this week, work on these problems, uh, then that's what they do.
Uh, so it depends a little bit on the structure of the program and what you're trying to accomplish. Okay,
Jeremy Singer: great. Uh, we have time for a few more questions.
Catalina Fuentes: Hello, Catalina Fuentes from Riverside County Office of Education in California. Um, just thank you so much for this conversation. My first thought when you were talking about, um, what do they spend that money on? And I'm gonna say for us it was remediation, a lot of remediation, especially at the secondary high school [00:46:00] level.
Yeah. So my question is on any of the schools that you worked with or districts, did they take a look at that reduced remediation, that return on investment with remediation costs could then turn around and help supplement to continue the tutoring process? Because I think what we do is a lot of tutoring, but we don't really measure that impact.
And at high school, that's the first thing I went to is. Did they see a decrease in remediation in the cost savings there?
Liz Cohen: Yeah, that's a great question. And I will say that high school is the hardest, uh, for a lot of reasons. And the programs, the high impact tutoring programs in high school tend to look pretty different.
Uh, algebra one is the one where there's like the most consistent, uh, uh, approach on this, and we have a lot of evidence about how to do it really well. I've also seen tutoring being used in really interesting ways in high school. So I write about a high school in Baltimore that used tutoring essentially to create almost like a ninth grade
bootcamp that was really around like mentorship, but also they built in math tutoring 'cause they wanted every ninth grader to participate in it. So there wouldn't be any stigma attached. The [00:47:00] stigma with tutoring gets more in high school and so they're, they kind of built in math tutoring along with mentorship uh, and some pieces like that, uh, that they are, I guess we're kind of waiting to see, but they're hoping that this will kind of pay off and sort of giving kids a better footing.
In Texas, uh,, in Odessa, while they were doing this big program in, in K eight in high school, they were really using tutoring to get kids to pass the state exit exams that they have there, uh, which is not super efficient in that it required a huge amount of oversight and like individual, like I'd have to go find Jeremy and pull him out of whatever, you know, elective he was in so that he could do his tutoring so he could pass the biology exam.
But they did get a several dozen kids through to graduation with their diploma by doing it in that way. And so, uh, I think that piece is too, but I think it's a great question. We don't have an answer, right? This is all still evolving right now. Um, and so that question of like, what could happen, can we cost out if we save this money and we got these kids feeling better about where they were, and then we could think differently about how we leverage all those [00:48:00] different pieces.
Um, and California, by the way, is a great example of also the opportunity with afterschool, just , um, with the extended learning, the Eloc funding. Uh, there's some really cool afterschool tutoring stuff happening in California with that too.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, we, we'd love to work with you to sort of make the business case and what type of research analysis we could do to try to show that return.
That'd be great.
Yeah.
Kris Chetty: Um, my name is, uh, Kris Chetty Frisco, ISD, which is a suburb north of Dallas. I really wanted to say Trent Crim, but I stopped myself. Um, um, my question was kind of differentiating between this idea of tutoring and test prep, like you mentioned Texas in particular, star testing, that kind of stuff.
Like is there a differentiation? What are they looking at to say? 'cause if, if they know they're looking at this particular benchmark, do you find tutors that focus on that benchmark and move away from broader teaching pedagogy, that kind of stuff?
Liz Cohen: Sure. I can't explain the offsides rule, but I can try to answer your question.
Uh, which is to say, I think it's really important that this kind of tutoring, high impact, high dosage tutoring is not homework help. And it's largely not test prep. [00:49:00] The Texas example was more of a, I don't think that counts as high impact tutoring, if I'm being honest. I think that was tutoring um. Um, to a specific aim that I think is respectable and understandable because we want kids to get their diploma.
These are all kids who had already failed the exit. There were five exit exams in Texas as you know, right? So they'd already failed the test that they were getting tutored on, and they were really trying to get them to pass it the second time. Uh, so we don't have good numbers on this, but I think that probably 80% at least of the tutoring is K eight.
And it's really just uh, it's more standards based tutoring that is supplemental to core instruction, which again, is why it's very popular with classroom teachers than it is about test prep. I think test prep tutoring is a different beast, and it's not typically what, uh, the high impact tutoring programs really focus on.
Jeremy Singer: And I just add, coming from the college board, I think , um, not preparing for a test, but having some way you can measure progress is important to see efficacy even if it's not a performance space. Other questions?
Lee Walden: Hello, Lee Walden from um, Delaware [00:50:00] Department of Education.
A few moments ago you hit on something that I've seen a lot with students. It's a stigma of tutoring. Mm-hmm. In your research, have you seen any best practices or features in these districts and schools that make the tutoring environment welcoming? Especially if a student is opted in as opposed to electing in?
Liz Cohen: Absolutely. So in the elementary level, if you use an intervention block kind of schedule, and then everyone is doing some small group intervention and that does a lot. So when Ector county started their tutoring, they originally were targeting their tier two kids, uh, for tutoring. And then it was like tier one was gonna do acceleration and tier three was, it was like a whole mess.
And basically they realized pretty quickly that this was like not gonna work on a few levels, and the stigma was part of it. And so they shifted the program to actually put more kids on tutoring with a small group doing a separate kind of acceleration. And the teachers all told me that that really just completely shifted the dynamic and it became not [00:51:00] tutoring as remediation, it became this is what we all do during this instructional block.
And I think that that, that goes a really long way.
Jeremy Singer: Excellent. Um, first of all, I wanna thank the audience. Uh, great questions. Uh, we were worried about would you have questions, would you have good questions? And you, you killed it. Uh, Uh, you may put me out of this side hustle with those kind of questions, but I'd appreciate it.
Um, so thank you for your engagement. And then most importantly, thank you, Liz, for those listening. Uh, the future of tutoring just came out a couple weeks ago. Get it through any of the channels. It's a great book. It really, um, laid out all the options and all the variables a school leader should think about in tutoring.
I think it can have a great impact. I'm inspired. Um, you know, I went into this podcast venture to try to figure out stuff that works and, and this is something that really inspired me. So thank you for coming today. Thank you for having written the book, and let's give her a hand.
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