Step Up Tutoring on Edtech Insiders: Scaling What Works

We're excited to share that our CEO Sam Olivieri and co-founder Daniel Halper recently joined Ben Kornell on the Edtech Insiders podcast. The conversation gets into the work we're doing at Step Up, covering everything from how we're building a national tutor corps and unlocking the potential of federal work-study, to the AI tools we're developing to make every tutor more effective. Here's a look at some of the key themes from the episode.

Tutoring works. The Challenge has always been access.

The evidence base on tutoring is about as strong as it gets in education. Consistent one-on-one support adds anywhere from three to fifteen months of additional learning. The problem isn't the intervention. It's that high-quality tutoring has historically been a tool for families with means, not a resource for students who need it most.

Step Up was built to flip that. By mobilizing adult volunteers, college students, work-study participants, and aspiring teachers as a national tutoring corps, we're tapping into a massive, mission-driven, and largely underutilized workforce and connecting them virtually with elementary students who need support.

Work-study is a bigger opportunity than most people realize.

There are 600,000 college students currently being paid through work-study jobs, most of them in roles with limited career relevance. A portion of those dollars is already required to go toward community service, and tutoring in Title I schools is the single largest placement for those roles. With the right policy support and institutional will, work-study could become one of the most significant pipelines for building a national tutor corps, while simultaneously giving college students career-aligned, meaningful experience on a path toward teaching.

Using AI to strengthen tutor practice.

One of the things we're most excited to talk about is how we're approaching AI at Step Up. While much of the edtech industry is focused on AI as a direct replacement for instruction, we've made a deliberate choice to build tools that support and strengthen tutors instead. Students show up and stay engaged because of the human relationship. What AI can do is reduce the cognitive load of instruction, helping a tutor know what skill to focus on, how to explain a concept clearly, and what the student struggled with last session.

Our tools, Session Briefing and Sidekick, work before and during sessions to give tutors the context and real-time guidance they need to deliver high-impact instruction, even if they're new to teaching. The tutor stays in control. The AI just makes them better at it.

Where we're headed.

Step Up has delivered over 300,000 hours of one-on-one tutoring. This school year we engaged over 3,000 tutors to serve over 5,000 students, and our volume of tutoring has doubled year-over-year for each of the past two years. We’re building towards something bigger: a national tutoring corps so that every child in need, regardless of where they live, has access to a 1:1 tutor. 

Give the full episode a listen on Edtech Insiders and if you're inspired to be part of this work, we'd love to have you. Visit stepuptutoring.org to become a tutor.