As a tutor at Eugene Field Elementary School in Rogers Park, Jacob Wilcox spent the last year listening to a small group of students read sentences aloud to figure out where they were struggling and build confidence.
“You see so much growth from students when they have that one-on-one support,” Wilcox said.
Many of his students — most of them from low-income, often multilingual families — never had an opportunity for tutoring until he arrived.
But this type of individualized support for literacy is vanishing from the Chicago Public Schools next year. Wilcox and 530 other tutors got layoff notices this week. Their last day will be May 30.
Hiring hundreds of tutors was one of CPS’ key strategies to shore up learning as students returned to in-person classes after the COVID-19 pandemic. When elementary school reading scores rebounded, CPS credited the tutors in part for the improvements.
But CPS officials said Friday that the school system is “refining and refocusing the program in response to key lessons learned and in alignment with current district resources.”
This year, more than 200 schools had literacy and math tutors. Next year, though, only 55 will get math tutors for middle school students, according to CPS, which is facing a budget deficit of at least $529 million.
Another factor in the decision: Soon-to-be-released research suggests that the expanded tutor program wasn’t as effective as prior studies suggested tutoring could be.
CPS officials said they plan to continue with other support efforts put in place post-pandemic, such as providing some schools with extra teachers called interventionists.
But the layoffs bring to an end one of the biggest tutoring efforts in the country. At the onset, CPS set out to use $25 million in federal COVID relief money to hire as many 800 tutors.
The tutoring program began in 2021. CPS eventually had hundreds of tutors, stationed in most schools. Since then, it has targeted resources in the schools whose students needed the most support. In 2025, the budget was $10 million.
But there’s a lot of variation among schools in how they are using tutors, according to Monica Bhatt, senior research director for the University of Chicago Education Lab. Some students had sessions several times a week. Others averaged once a week or less.
Bhatt said tutoring could be a “very effective accelerant” for learning when it’s implemented well. The key is getting a high enough dosage of tutoring to realize those big gains for students and families, she said.
Scaling down the program next school year is one way to make sure students get the most benefit, Bhatt said.
Tutors at some elementary schools said they saw amazing results. Lisabeth Weiner, who has tutored at Reilly Elementary since 2021, said she had one girl who came to her unable to read at all.
“Suddenly, two years later, she was reading,” Weiner said. “Her fluency was unbelievable. She was able to read whole passages, maybe hitting 160 words a minute. It was miraculous.”
Weiner said that, if students struggle in reading, they will have trouble in other subjects.
Wilcox and Weiner are questioning why tutors weren’t kept on until the end of the school year, June 12. Weiner said she suspected the tutoring program would be in trouble, given CPS’s budget problems but planned lessons and activities until the last day.
CPS officials did not say why they were laying the tutors off two weeks before the school year ends but that they are “deeply grateful for their service and commitment to Chicago’s young people” and committed to helping them with this transition.