District Partnerships
Beginning in 2004, Match Charter Public School developed a unique and innovative model to provide high-dosage tutoring to students. During the early years of the program, we researched questions such as:
- What is the ideal tutor/student ratio?
- How should the tutors be trained?
- How should tutors be held accountable for student learning?
- Who makes a great tutor?
- How can we recruit great tutors?
“Match-style tutoring is less expensive and has proven far more effective than widely accepted reforms such as reduced class size and extended school days.”
We have honed our model over the past decade and amassed a compelling body of data demonstrating its effectiveness in driving student achievement at Match Charter Public School.
Key components of our tutoring model include the following:
- Tutoring is a continuous, intensive experience; tutoring is provided to students every day.
- Tutorial is embedded into the school day as its own period; it is not a pull out or a push in model.
- Tutors tutor full class sections of students so that the classroom teacher is free during those periods.
- Tutoring happens in small groups (1:2, 1:1).
- Tutor/student pairs remain consistent throughout the year.
- Tutors receive two full weeks of initial training and extensive and ongoing support and monitoring (tutors are observed daily).
- Tutors have the opportunity to take on other school-based projects in their extra time.
Districts across the country have requested our support in building tutoring programs within their schools. We have constructed model tutoring programs in large urban districts:
Houston
Overview: In 2010, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) partnered with Roland Fryer and Harvard EdLabs to implement a five-part, large scale intervention in nine chronically underperforming schools.
Scope: Match Education provided high dosage math tutoring in four high schools (grade 9) and five middle schools (grade 6), and tutored all students six out of eight periods every day.
Results: Roland Fryer and the Harvard EdLabs team conducted a highly controlled study of Match tutoring in Houston. Sixth-grade students who received daily math tutoring gained the equivalent of 6 additional months of schooling. Gains achieved by ninth-grade students ranged between nearly 5 months of additional learning to more than 9 months of additional learning.
Lawrence
Overview: In 2012, Match Education was contracted by Lawrence Public Schools to provide its tutoring services for two years to all students in grade 9 and 10 in two of its lowest performing high schools as part of a district-wide turnaround effort, under receivership of the Massachusetts Department of Education.
Scope: Match Education provided a total of 83,928 hours of individualized instruction during the 2012-2013 school year.
Results: Students receiving the Match Education intervention experienced a 52 point growth (in student growth percentile, or SGP), from 23 to 75. This was unprecedented math growth and was the greatest one-year change in SGP any high school had seen in math in Massachusetts history.
Chicago
Overview: During the 2012-2013 school year, the University of Chicago Crime Lab tested a combination of the Becoming a Man (BAM) mentoring program by Youth Guidance, together with our “no-excuses,” high-dosage daily tutoring model within Chicago district schools.
Scope: During 2013-2014, we provided intensive math tutoring to over 600 students across 12 high schools. During the 2014-2015 school year, we are serving 1,130 students across 15 high schools.
Results: Initial findings support that the Becoming a Man mentoring program and Match-style tutoring together can be extremely protective against risk of violence involvement for even youth in the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago. School misconduct decreased by 67%; absenteeism decreased by 22%; and course failures decreased by 37%. Research suggests that these changes in student outcomes – particularly the rate of student misconducts – will lead to a 50-60% reduction in youth violent-crime arrests over the next one to two years.
Read more about our partnership with the Chicago School District in the New York Times.
“Since the Apollo 20 project was launched... I have witnessed phenomenal behavioral and academic changes in the students. I have seen apathetic students change to students who are excited, enthusiastic learners; students who were failing every subject become engaged in learning and making better grades; students who, in the past, avoided talking with me about their grades, come. . . waving their report cards in their hands to show me their improvement; students who thought of themselves as incapable begin to think of themselves as capable learners; and students who thought that dreams were for others, begin to dare to dream about the world outside their school and community and how they can contribute.”
