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An experimental intervention in the 1980s raised certain test scores by two standard deviations. It wasn't just tutoring, and it's never been replicated, but it continues to inspire.
In the fall of 1945, when my father was not quite eight years old, his teacher told my grandmother that he was failing 2nd grade. My father doesn't remember her reasons, or maybe my grandmother never told him, but the teacher felt he wasn't ready for 2nd-grade work.
"If he's not succeeding in 2nd grade," my grandmother suggested, "why not try him in 3rd?" And she found a tutor, a retired teacher from a different school.
For seven weeks, my father met for an hour a day with the tutor, who gave him homework after each session. The tutor's charge was to make sure my father mastered the curriculum, not just for 2nd grade but for enough of 3rd grade that he could slip into a 3rd-grade classroom in January 1946, a year early, without needing further help.
But the tutor overdid it. Not only did my father encounter nothing in 3rd grade she hadn't taught him, but he coasted through 4th and 5th grade as well.
Around 1960, while shopping at Filene's Basement in downtown Boston, my grandmother ran into an old neighbor-a mom who'd moved away when my grandmother was seeking a tutor to help her son escape from 2nd grade. After bragging about her own family, the neighbor asked if my father was all right.
"He's fine!" said my grandmother triumphantly. "He's at Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship."
Stories like this give the impression that tutors can work miracles. For centuries after Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great, certain fortunate individuals-including Albert Einstein, Felix Mendelssohn, Agatha Christie, and practically every British monarch before Charles III-were educated partly or entirely by private tutors and family members. While no scholar regrets the spread of mass schooling, many suspect that the instruction students receive from a teacher in a large classroom can never match the personalized instruction that comes from a tutor focused only on their individual needs.
In a 1984 essay, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago, asserted that tutoring offered "the best learning conditions we can devise." Tutors, Bloom claimed, could...