Marty Haoyuan Chen, an economist at the University of Maryland, linked business records for every private tutoring establishment in Texas from 1997 to 2025 with state records that follow more than five million public school students from high school into college and work. His paper is dated October 12, 2026 and was released as Annenberg Institute EdWorkingPaper 26-1619. Over that period the number of tutoring centres in Texas grew from 234 to more than 900, and the share of public high schools with at least one centre within two miles rose from 19 to 37 per cent. The study compares students at the same high school in different years, as centres opened and closed nearby (Chen, 2026).
By 2025, 41 US states and the District of Columbia had passed laws aligned with the science of reading: requirements for explicit, systematic teaching of phonics and other foundational skills, early screening, teacher training and approved materials. Florence Bason and Christopher Redding of the University of Florida tested whether those laws changed Grade 4 reading results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), using state data from 2003 to 2024. Their paper was released in October 2026 as EdWorkingPaper 26-1616 (Bason and Redding, 2026).