At the close of 2023, Baltimore City Public Schools (City Schools) received a $1.187 million grant from the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) to support mathematics tutoring in the city, specifically focusing on expanding opportunities for college students to serve as tutors. These new grant dollars aimed to replicate the successful University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) Reach Together Tutoring Program (RTTP) with three additional university partners. RTTP launched in 2021 with start-up funds from the Abell Foundation and has since provided 1,400 students with regular mathematics tutoring led by graduate and undergraduate students.
UMBC students administer RTTP tutoring twice a week for 45- to 60-minute sessions during the school day using a framework that includes community building, fluency practice, daily review of grade-level skills identified by classroom teachers, and student practice. During the 2023-2024 school year, RTTP completed nearly 20,000 tutoring sessions across nine school sites over the course of 24 weeks. Participating students grew an average of 19.6 scale score points on the iReady assessment from the beginning to the end of the year. Despite RTTP’s focus on students in the bottom quartile of math proficiency in each of its five schools, RTTP students demonstrated iReady growth rates nearly commensurate with the top 75% of students at each school site (19.6 points of scaled score growth versus 20.3).
Through participation in the UMBC tutoring program, students who had high anxiety about math gained confidence in their abilities and now look forward to practicing their math skills!
– Mark Bongiovanni, principal at RTTP partner school Curtis Bay Elementary
A RTTP tutor works with students.
Through the MSDE grant, City Schools plans to build additional partnerships in 2024 with Morgan State University, Johns Hopkins University, and Loyola University to recruit tutors to support middle-grade math students. Using the RTTP model as a roadmap, UMBC will support the new higher education partners while providing technical assistance in recruiting university students, scheduling visits, building school relationships, managing transportation, and implementing successful mathematics tutoring by drawing from its experience over the past three years. The goal is for each university to support one or two district schools and to recruit 50 tutors across the six new program sites. In addition to serving as one of the first investors in UMBC’s Reach Together Tutoring Program, the Abell Foundation has continued to support the expansion of math tutoring by committing additional funding to supplement transportation costs for university student tutors. With MSDE’s substantial investment in expanding math tutoring statewide, City Schools aims to provide high-dosage math tutoring to around 1,500 students in the upcoming year to further improve math proficiency across Baltimore City.