The five-year grant will allow about 4,500 students in grades 1-2 who are behind in reading to be tutored through Air Reading, a company that connects students with live tutors over video. Several Louisiana school districts already use the program, including Jefferson Parish, where a new study found that the tutoring significantly improved struggling readers' test scores.
The Department of Education awarded the research grant to the Louisiana Department of Education, which will coordinate the tutoring and track student data. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University will evaluate the effort to see whether gains like those in Jefferson Parish can be replicated on a larger scale — in rural and urban school districts, and in traditional and charter public schools.
If the virtual tutoring program proves effective at a large scale, it could be a valuable tool for school districts that struggle to recruit and pay for in-person tutors — especially those in more remote areas.
"These dollars are essentially the United States Department of Education showing their belief in Louisiana and our efforts and saying, 'We want to learn more because this could be a model for the nation,'" said state Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley.
Louisiana has attracted national attention since the pandemic for its embrace of intensive or "high-dosage" tutoring, where trained tutors work with students multiple times each week. The state Education Department launched an ongoing campaign to help every school offer the service, and the state Legislature allocated $30 million last year for high-dosage tutoring and passed a bill requiring that it be offered to students in grades K-5 who are behind in math or reading.
"Louisiana is way out in front of other states in the field of tutoring," said Liz Cohen, an education researcher and author of a new book called, "The Future of Tutoring."
Driven by research showing that tutoring can be one of the most effective ways to boost student learning, thousands of school districts nationwide used emergency federal aid during the pandemic to launch tutoring programs to catch up students who fell behind, Cohen noted. But she said Louisiana stands out for continuing to fund tutoring programs after the pandemic aid ended and by providing guidance, such as a list of approved vendors like Air Reading, in its push to made tutoring available to every elementary school student who needs it.
"They really put their money with their mouth is on tutoring," said Cohen, who is vice president of policy at 50CAN, a national education advocacy group to promotes tutoring.
VIRTUAL TUTORING
At Greenlawn Terrace Elementary School in Kenner, Principal Wilbert Pharr said he's been impressed by the virtual tutoring program.
Three times a week, students in first, second and third grade pull on headsets, pop open their Chromebooks and start chatting with their Air Reading tutors. Pharr said the young students haven't had trouble staying focused during the 30-minute video sessions.
"We thought it would be difficult for them to sustain their attention that long," he said, "but they love it."
Last year, about 30 Greenlawn Terrace students participated in the pilot program — and all improved their reading scores, Pharr said. As a result, the school tripled the number of participating students this year.
Pharr attributes the success partly to the "phenomenal relationships" that students develop with the human tutors, even though they only meet through screens.
"It's not like an algorithm," he said. "This is much more engaging, and the quality of teaching is top-notch."
Researchers at Johns Hopkins' Center for Research and Reform in Education evaluated the Air Reading program in Jefferson Parish and a rural Texas school district. Both studies used randomized controlled trials, considered the gold standard in education research, to measure the tutors' impact.
In the Texas district, the roughly 380 students who received one semester of tutoring made reading gains equivalent to a month and a half of learning, the researchers found. The impact was larger in Jefferson Parish, where 170 students at five elementary schools worked with Air Reading tutors throughout the 2024-25 school year. Those students, who all started out behind in reading, made gains that translate to more than four extra months of learning compared with similar peers who weren't tutored, according to the study.
"That's large by what we would expect in tutoring or virtual tutoring," said Amanda Neitzel, the Johns Hopkins research professor who led the study, who noted that the sample size was relatively small.
Neitzel said the results are promising because they suggest that virtual tutoring, which typically is more affordable than in-person tutoring and offers more scheduling flexibility, can still be academically effective. She also noted that schools sometimes struggle to provide students enough tutoring "doses," or weekly sessions, but the Jefferson Parish students still made reading gains even if they didn't receive the recommended 56 or more sessions.
Now, through the federal grant, Neitzel and her colleagues will evaluate Louisiana's expansion of virtual literacy tutoring to elementary schools across several districts, at least a quarter of which will be in rural areas.
"I'm interested to find out," she said, "can tutoring move the needle when implemented across the entire state?"
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