Impacts of intensive tutoring and mentoring program

Posted by University of Chicago on March 2, 2015

After just a single year in Chicago’s intensive tutoring and mentoring program known as Match, participants ended up as much as two years ahead of students in a control group who didn’t get this help.

NOT TOO LATE:
Building on the promise of Match-style tutoring

Graduation rates and achievement test scores of black and Hispanic youth remain far lower than those of their white counterparts, and this gap is mirrored by striking disparities between rich and poor. As a society, we have made little progress towards closing these gaps over the past 40 years (Murnane, 2013). The test score gap between rich and poor (the 90th and the 10th percentiles of the income distribution) has actually increased substantially since 1940 (Reardon, 2011). Improving academic outcomes for disadvantaged youth is one of our nation’s most urgent challenges.

Most attempts to improve academic outcomes for disadvantaged adolescents have yielded disappointing results. This has led to growing concern that improving the academic skills of low-income children when they have already reached adolescence is too difficult and costly, which in turn has led some observers to argue that policy should focus on vocationally oriented instruction for teens or else on early childhood education.

http://crimelab.uchicago.edu/news/urban-education-lab-and-crime-lab-release-new-report-current-large-scale-study-match-educations