High-Dosage Tutoring Boosts Literacy Skills, Bridging Grade-Level Proficiency in First Cohort of Participating San Francisco Students
Students who participated in 20+ sessions gained approximately half a school year’s worth of literacy skills, significantly closing the gap in reaching grade level proficiency
San Francisco, CA – March 26, 2023 – The San Francisco Education Fund (Ed Fund) today announced the success with providing high-dosage, high-impact free virtual tutoring via BookNook to San Francisco public school students, specifically the 955 students who participated in the program’s first cohort from December 2022-April 2023. As demonstrated by recent assessments, this program has substantively changed outcomes for student participants. The tutoring initiative has been supporting the acceleration of student learning for those most affected by unfinished learning resulting from the pandemic.
Assessment results from the initial cohort indicate that the students who started the program furthest behind experienced the most substantial academic gains. Students who actively engaged in 20 or more tutoring sessions, starting an average of 1.36 years behind, made remarkable progress, achieving approximately five months of reading skills growth during the approximately 12-week implementation period. Students with medium usage (10-19 sessions) demonstrated up to 1.8 months of grade level equivalency gains.
Literacy gains from students participating in BookNook tutoring program
Guadalupe Elementary, an SFUSD school in the Excelsior neighborhood with many newcomer students – or those who have recently arrived to the United States – has enrolled nearly every student in BookNook. Ana Garcia, a third-grade bilingual teacher at the elementary school, has been teaching for over 25 years and observed significant literacy gains among her students who participated in the program. “One of the things that I love about [the program] is that it really meets the students at their level and it's addressing the skills that they need,” explained Garcia. “My high-level readers are getting comprehension support, and my low-level readers are getting phonics and grammar and anything else that they need.”
In 2021, with the support of private funders from community philanthropic leaders and in partnership with SFUSD and SF Department of Children, Youth and Their Families (DCYF), the Ed Fund launched the pilot high-dosage tutoring program to 1,000 students. Since then, program data shows that actively participating students caught up twice as fast compared to those without tutoring, with 42% of participants achieving grade-level proficiency. The tutoring program gained national recognition from Accelerate, a nonprofit organization that seeks to support broad implementation of proven programs that are highly effective in advancing student learning, specifically addressing equity and academic impact from COVID disruptions.
In the fall of 2022, test results confirmed that the pandemic caused students to fall behind in their academic growth. Just over 50% of SFUSD students are grade-proficient in literacy and just under 50% are grade-proficient in math.
In March 2023, the Ed Fund launched Accelerate Learning SF, a $3 million initiative aiming to expand high-impact learning acceleration services to an additional 5,000 public school students. This effort specifically addresses unfinished learning in core subjects brought on by disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic. In the Ed Fund’s ongoing commitment to empowering public school students, it prioritizes the most under-resourced schools in San Francisco whose students may not otherwise have access to high-quality tutoring services to help them reach grade level proficiency.
“High-impact tutoring has the capacity to meet each child where they are in their academic journey, and provide them individual learning acceleration plans so they can more quickly re-join and absorb grade-level learning activities and curriculum,” said Jenny Siegel, Program Director at the San Francisco Education Fund. “And just as importantly, high-impact tutoring also presents a cost-effective approach to address equity and broader access to quality learning for all students.”
The Ed Fund’s tutoring services have reached 6,000 students in the last two years and the Accelerate Learning SF initiative is set to nearly double its reach in the upcoming two years. The Ed Fund – in partnership with LearnPlatform, BookNook, and SFUSD – will publish the findings of the second and third cohort in the fall via an impact and implementation study.