Like hundreds of school districts, Aspire purchased an online tutoring service for the spring of 2021 to help these students. Students could log in to the tutoring service, called Paper, whenever they wanted, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and connect with a tutor to help with schoolwork in any subject. There was no video or audio, but students could text chat with a human tutor and work together on a virtual whiteboard and share documents. The tutoring was free to students no matter how much they used it.
The nonprofit charter school network also invited a team of university researchers to study whether the online tutoring service was helping students. The results were disheartening for those who hope that on-demand tutoring might be an effective way to help students catch up. (Researchers agreed not to disclose the name of the tutoring company in the study but, Aspire has been public about its 2021 tutoring deal with the Montreal-based tutoring giant Paper, also known as Paper Education Company Inc..)
This story about on-demand tutoring was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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