Closing the income-achievement gap? Experimental evidence from high-dosage tutoring in Dutch primary education

Abstract

We present experimental evidence on a high-dosage math tutoring (HDT) program implemented in three primary schools in a low-income neighborhood in the Netherlands. We find treatment effects on math scores of 0.28 national population standard deviations after one school year (p<0.01). These effects can account for 40% of the math achievement gap between low-income and high-income students in the Netherlands. As most of the evidence on intensive tutoring programs draws on research from the United States, we conclude that (i.) HDT programs can be successfully built from the ground up and exported to different institutional settings while maintaining substantial effect sizes, and, (ii.) existing income-achievement gaps can be substantially reduced by targeting low-income communities with scalable interventions like HDT.