Are Your Tutoring Programs Working? What Baltimore Taught Me About Data, Infrastructure, and Impact

By: Matt Barrow, Director of Services

It’s such a simple question, but it’s way more challenging to actually answer: are your tutoring programs working? When I led Baltimore City Public Schools’ high-dosage tutoring strategy during the height of ESSER funding, the urgency was palpable. The district had made a bold investment, and the pressure to figure out how to make it work across the complex landscapes of vendors, internal programs, and schools was sky high. Our goal was clear and our strategy was sound: get the right tutoring into every school and ensure it made a measurable difference. But as I quickly learned, good intentions aren’t enough. Without infrastructure, even the best strategies collapse under their own complexity.

I quickly understood the need for real-time and transparent implementation data, so I turned to Google Sheets to track enrollment, attendance, and vendor performance. I spent over 100 hours building interconnected dashboards just to get basic visibility into what was happening across 129 schools. That system gave us a real-time pulse, but only because I manually duct-taped it together along the way. And even then, we couldn’t get to the level of granularity we needed to truly evaluate impact. Student-level dosage data, for example, remained out of reach, which made a true evaluation of impact next to impossible.

Baltimore’s experience isn’t unique. Across the country, district leaders are asking the same fundamental question: Are our tutoring programs working? Unfortunately, too many are operating in the dark, using lagging data and fragmented systems to manage one of the most powerful academic interventions we have. Unfortunately, the result is usually missed opportunities, wasted dollars, and programs that don’t scale or sustain.

If we want tutoring to deliver on its promise, we need to stop treating it like an afterthought and start managing it like the mission-critical initiative it is. That starts with infrastructure. Scaling and sustaining effective high-impact tutoring is not just about a good curriculum or great tutors. It’s about having the operational backbone to coordinate people, track fidelity, and respond to what the data is telling us before the school year is over.

The research backs this up. According to Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator, effective tutoring programs must embed data use and program improvement into their core practices. That means collecting and acting on session attendance data, formative assessments, monitoring student progress in real time, and building systems that support continuous feedback loops between schools, programs, and central office staff.

Yet many districts are still managing tutoring through static spreadsheets, disconnected platforms, or (God forbid) PDF reports from vendors that then require hours of extra time to unpack. They can’t see which students are receiving enough sessions, whether tutors are showing up, or if students are even making any progress.

What’s the alternative? Imagine a centralized system where you can onboard tutors, schedule sessions, track attendance automatically, and visualize student progress in real time. Imagine being able to identify which vendors are delivering impact, which schools need support, and which students are falling through the cracks before outcomes are measured. That kind of infrastructure doesn’t just improve efficiency; it builds trust, drives equity, and turns data into a jet engine for continuous improvement.

Districts don’t need more programs that use flashy products to deliver empty promises, they need a system. A system that doesn’t require epic spreadsheet acrobatics or full-time data wranglers. A system that was purpose-built for tutoring, not adapted from complex MTSS platforms or learning management systems. And most importantly, a system that puts real-time insight in the hands of those responsible for getting implementation right.

In Baltimore, we did the best we could with the tools we had. But I left that role knowing that infrastructure isn’t a luxury, it’s fundamental for districts to make sure their students are actually getting the full benefits promised by all the research on high-impact tutoring. It’s the foundation of any tutoring program that hopes to endure beyond recovery dollars. So I’ll ask again: are your programs working? And more importantly, how do you know?

Learn more about how Pearl Education can help you see if your programs are working.