The recent release of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that American students—particularly struggling students—are falling behind in reading and treading water in math compared with scores from two years ago, which were themselves abysmally low. Chronic absenteeism (missing more than 10 percent of school days) is rampant across the country. In Florida, three out of 10 students were chronically absent during the 2023–24 school year; in D.C. the rate was close to 39 percent. Homeschooling and microschools are flourishing as never before. In many public school districts, enrollment is down as students and parents are literally voting with their feet away from an education paradigm that is just not working for them. We can’t keep doing school the same way and expect different results (see insanity, definition of). Instead, we need to reimagine public education as an enterprise that personalizes learning for every child. A big part of that reimagining should include tutoring—specifically the evidence-based intensive approach known as “high-dosage tutoring”.

Where in the world would public schools get the funds to provide tutors for every one of their students? Brown University professor Matt Kraft, one of the OGs in the study of high-dosage tutoring, wrote a research paper in 2021 that called for tutoring to be scaled nationwide. He estimated that a targeted effort aimed at supporting kids who needed it most would cost between $5 billion and $16 billion annually. Then along came the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund, which pumped close to $200 billion into schools, a sizable portion of which was used to undertake an unprecedented investment in tutoring.

ESSER funding was good for quickly establishing some proof points around the efficacy of tutoring. However, two bad things happened as a result of this windfall. First, a lot of ineffectual tutoring efforts (for example, one tutor working with 15 students at a time) were undertaken that didn’t benefit students. These tarnished tutoring initiatives that adhered to best practices, like keeping student-to-tutor ratios at or below 4:1. Second, the fate of tutoring was linked with a temporary and finite cash infusion. Over the last year, I’ve been in many conversations with tutor advocates who believe the sky is falling because the extraordinary amount of ESSER funds will not be sustained. “Fiscal cliff!” “What will we do in September 2025 when the last of these monies get spent?!”  This Chicken Little-ism has been reinforced by headlines such as this recent one on the shuttering of FEV Tutor, a for-profit tutoring provider: “Tutoring Giant’s Sudden Demise Linked to End of Federal Relief Funds”.

The future of personalizing learning in America’s public schools with a tutor for every student during the school day is not a matter of waiting for federal manna to fall from the sky. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, collective spending by school districts across the U.S. in the 2020–21academic year (pre-ESSER) was close to $1 trillion (that’s trillion with a T), which was up 13 percent for the preceding 10 years, even after adjusting for inflation.

It’s at this time of year when principals, school board members (especially their finance committees), and superintendents are actively developing school budgets for the coming year. If they used a zero-based budgeting approach and built their 2025–26 budgets from scratch, justifying each line item and expenditure, high-dosage tutoring should top the list of what schools should be spending money on. Why? To quote from Matt Kraft’s 2021 paper, “Individualized instruction is among the most effective education interventions ever subjected to rigorous evaluation.”

The funding to support high-dosage tutoring programs exists in every school budget. Tapping into it is really a matter of allocating the funds away from activities that don’t benefit students as much. How? Savvy superintendents could review a 2017 meta-analysis of 89 randomized control trials which showed that tutoring boosted academic achievement significantly more than class size reduction, vacation academies, or extended school day/year initiatives. I’d also suggest they take a hard look at budget line items that fund professional development and teacher’s aides and ask: Do the dollars spent in these areas benefit students as much as it would to provide them with a tutor?

There’s a reason that zero-based budgeting isn’t widely used and exists mostly in the minds of education wonks and public policy classrooms. Simple inertia makes next year’s school budget essentially the same as last year’s. Every line represents an entrenched interest that is going to fight tooth and nail to protect its turf and maintain the status quo. There is a Newtonian law of motion at work here: A school budget and the priorities it represents will remain constant unless acted upon by an unbalanced external force. Perhaps the pandemic provided that external force we needed to shut down the Henry Ford–inspired assembly line that has been dominant in public schooling for the last 100 years and we can start a Steven Jobs–style Genius Bar model where every student gets the exact help they need to thrive. We’ve got the money. Do we have the will?

Michael Thomas Duffy is the President of the GO Tutor Corps, a non-profit organization that envisions an America where every child has the support of a tutor. He is also an adjunct professor at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service and a 1987 graduate of Harvard Kennedy School.