Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

There is growing concern that improving the academic skills of children in poverty is too difficult and costly once they reach adolescence, and so policymakers should instead focus on vocationally oriented instruction or early childhood education. Yet this conclusion might be premature given that so few previous interventions have targeted a key barrier to school success: “mismatch” between what schools deliver and the needs of youth, particularly those far behind grade level. We present findings from two randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in public high schools in Chicago that demonstrate that participating in an intensive, individualized tutoring intervention led to large and replicable impacts on academic gains for disadvantaged youth.

The intervention is designed to address the fact that variance in academic achievement increases as students progress through school, particularly in low-income urban areas. It is not uncommon in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) serving these communities to see high school students who struggle to do 3rd or 4th grade-level work. However, many education reforms focus on improving the quality of teaching for on-grade-level material – something that may not be helpful to a 10th grader who is doing elementary-school-level work.

What is needed is an individualized approach to supporting these students – the educational equivalent of personalized medicine. SAGA Innovations tutoring is one such approach, based on the key insight that teaching one or two students is a fundamentally different task from teaching twenty or thirty. Many skills that are critical for classroom teaching and usually require extensive training or on-the-job learning are simply not relevant when tutoring one or two students at a time. This greatly broadens the applicant pool of people who can tutor compared to those who can teach an entire classroom of students, and greatly shortens the learning curve required to become effective. This in turn enables SAGA to employ a recruitment model that makes it economically possible to provide high school students with one full hour a day every day of two-on-one instruction during the school day.

In the 2014-15 school year, we randomly assigned over 2,600 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) ninth and tenth graders drawn from 11 high schools that serve predominantly low-income, students of color to either participate in SAGA tutoring or business as usual. We replicated this study in the 2015-16 school year, randomly assigning over 5,000 additional 9^th and 11^th graders from 15 CPS schools. In the first year of the study, participation increased math achievement test scores by 0.19 to 0.31 standard deviations (SD), depending on how the researchers standardize these measures; increased math grades by 0.50 SD; and reduced course failures in math by one-half in addition to reducing failures in non-math courses. While results of the second study are still embargoed, initial analyses suggest similar or larger program effects were realized. These impacts on a per-dollar basis—with a cost per participant of around $3,800, or $2,500 if delivered at larger scale—are as large as those of almost any other educational intervention whose effectiveness has been rigorously studied.