Short answer: The instructional case for high-dosage tutoring is settled; the bottleneck is visibility. Two AERA 2026 presentations — one on what five states have learned from two years of implementation, the other on the quality of the federal ESSER expenditure record — converge on the same point: without interoperable, trustworthy data, neither states nor researchers can see what is working, and what cannot be seen cannot be scaled.
Key findings
- State lessons (five-state collaboration). Plan for data interoperability up front, minimize collection burden on schools, integrate tutoring data into broader state systems, and use transparency to drive improvement.
- Federal data lessons. The Year-4 ESSER expenditure release shows systematic distortion — rounded estimates, repeated placeholder values, structured missingness — that limits what causal and equity research can ask of it.
- Synthesis. Implementation challenges and data governance failures are the same problem viewed from two altitudes: poor measurement infrastructure prevented real-time understanding of how $190B was spent, and the same gap now constrains how high-dosage tutoring scales.
Publication
Godfrey, J. (2026, April 27). You Can’t Scale What You Can’t See. Accelerate.
See also
- What have the states leading recovery learned after two years of tutoring implementation — the five-state AERA presentation
- How usable is the federal ESSER expenditure dataset for research — the AERA Benford’s Law audit
- How can we engineer data-informed tutoring at scale — the DATAS open standard
- What would an open standard for tutoring data look like
- How much has the US spent on high-dosage tutoring
- ESSER Data Snapshots