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Newark Public Schools will receive $400,000 from the state to expand high-impact tutoring in the 2026-27 school year to help K-12 students who are struggling in math and reading.
Newark has already implemented high-impact tutoring, a model that relies on small group tutoring sessions with the same tutor three times a week. The district has also implemented tutoring before and after school, in the summer, and through its Saturday Academy programs designed to address pandemic learning loss and speed up academic recovery. The new funding will build on the district’s work to offer high-impact tutoring and continue its use of artificial intelligence to tutor students with teacher oversight.
The state Department of Education allocated $7.5 million through the third round of the New Jersey Learning Acceleration Program grant to 55 school districts and charter schools statewide.
The grant was created to support students disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. It targets school districts where student proficiency rates in English and math for grades 3 to 8 remain below 50%.
In Newark, New Jersey’s largest public school system, student performance in statewide math and reading tests last spring stayed below state averages but inched closer to pre-pandemic levels. In 2025, only 34% of Newark Public Schools’ students in grades 3-9 passed the state’s English Language Arts test, while 21.1% of students passed the math test.
Research says the high-impact tutoring model works better than after-school tutoring programs, but as the push to expand those efforts continues, school districts are still struggling to staff, finance, and schedule the programs.
In 2023, Superintendent Roger León said that federal COVID relief dollars were the district’s “saving grace” in expanding summer and tutoring programs.
But as that money ran out, states like New Jersey and Tennessee budgeted money to continue paying for high-dosage tutoring. Newark has received over a million dollars since 2023, when the grant was first created, according to the state education department.
The district also implemented Khanmigo, an AI chatbot developed by online learning giant Khan Academy that acts as a tutor for students and an assistant for teachers. Newark leaders said they decided to expand Khanmigo in 2024 after students who used it during its pilot phase in the 2023-24 school year showed improvements in their math scores. The expansion was backed by a grant from the Bill Gates Foundation.
But experts have said that more research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of AI in education, even as they gain popularity among school districts. And Khan Academy founder Sal Khan has admitted AI tutoring hasn’t motivated students or reached the level of success some had predicted. In April, Newark Public Schools became the first district in the nation to receive the Khan Academy Award for Excellence and Innovation for its districtwide implementation of Khanmigo.
Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.
