(The Center Square) – A bill by Sen. Patrick McMath that would expand Louisiana’s high-dosage tutoring program to more students unanimously cleared the Education Committee of the Louisiana Senate this week, marking another step in the state’s push to build on recent academic gains.
McMath’s bill would extend eligibility for the tutoring program from kindergarten through fifth grade to include students through eighth grade. Under current law, the program provides additional funding to schools for small-group or one-on-one tutoring for younger students who are behind in literacy and math.
The expansion comes as Louisiana continues to lean on tutoring and other academic interventions to raise student performance. State leaders have pointed to the high-dosage tutoring program as one factor behind the state’s recent improvement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, where Louisiana climbed from 43rd to 32nd nationally. The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education supports the bill.
“I’ve had the opportunity to speak to several states about the success Louisiana is having, and it’s pretty inspirational that Louisiana, again, is a leader in a field, and not the bottom of the list, but at the top,” McMath, R-Covington, told the committee.
Sen. Beth Mizell, R-Franklinton, also pointed to the state’s rising profile on education policy.
“I got a call this week that the Minister of Education from Northern Ireland is coming to Louisiana to see how we’ve been able to move our rankings up,” Mizell said.
The program costs the state about $30 million and serves around 178,000 students. Expanding it to cover sixth through eighth grade would cost an estimated additional $15.2 million annually, according to the Louisiana Department of Education, though the final number of students served would depend on how many campuses qualify.
An analysis from Harvard and Stanford’s Education Recovery Scorecard found Louisiana ranked first in the nation for reading recovery and second for math recovery between 2019 and 2024. The study said Louisiana was the only state where the average student had fully recovered academically from pandemic-era losses over that span, giving lawmakers fresh ammunition as they argue the tutoring model is worth expanding.
The state’s tutoring push has also attracted new federal backing. In December 2025, the Louisiana Department of Education announced it had secured a $15 million federal grant to expand and study the impact of high-dosage literacy tutoring for younger students reading below grade level.
The department said the five-year effort will serve about 4,500 students in grades 1 and 2 across rural, suburban and urban schools, suggesting federal officials see enough promise in Louisiana’s early results to invest in scaling the approach further.
