In September 2026, Elizabeth Huffaker of the University of Florida and Bess Levin Markel, Carly D. Robinson and Susanna Loeb of Stanford University released a working paper through the Annenberg Institute at Brown University on a question schools and families both ask: which tutors get the best results? The team studied a high-dosage online literacy tutoring program for elementary students, run by the curriculum company Amplify during the 2022-23 school year. Because tutors were randomly assigned to small student groups, the researchers could compare tutors fairly. The final sample covered 1,638 students in 512 tutoring groups, taught by 155 tutors, with reading progress measured on the DIBELS-8 assessment from the start to the middle of the school year (Huffaker et al., 2026).
The results run against some common assumptions. In this program, neither holding a bachelor's degree nor having previous classroom teaching experience predicted larger reading gains. Black students assigned to Black tutors did not see uniquely larger gains, a contrast with research on classroom teachers. The trait that stood out was experience with the same program: tutors who had already worked with the provider were associated with 0.2 standard deviations greater literacy growth, a meaningful difference in education research. The authors conclude that developing and keeping tutors matters for large programs, especially as tutoring has become routine in US schools, where 85 percent of schools offered tutoring by June 2025 according to federal survey data cited in the paper (Huffaker et al., 2026).