Why Your Tutoring Program Is Quietly Failing Students With Aly Murray

Building a tutoring nonprofit that now serves 25,000 students a year — with a vision to reach millions — required someone who'd lived the exact gap she was trying to close. Aly Murray grew up a low-income student raised by a single immigrant mother, moved through a string of Title 1 schools, and felt firsthand what it's like to navigate homework and college applications without support at home. She left a trading job at JP Morgan eight years ago to build Upchieve, a nonprofit offering free, 24/7 human tutoring and college counseling to every Title 1 middle and high school student in the country. Her work is backed by a Gates Foundation-funded study comparing human and AI tutoring, and Upchieve now partners with schools, districts, and CMOs at a cost of about 50 cents per tutoring session. Most school tutoring programs run from 3 to 5pm — and that single design choice quietly locks out the students who need help the most. Aly Murray, founder of the nonprofit Upchieve, built a 24/7 human tutoring program instead, and the data on why AI can't replace it yet might surprise you. 📚 What You'll Learn Why the standard after-school tutoring program design quietly excludes the students who need it most What a Brookings Institute report reveals about grades, identity, and college enrollment Why Upchieve's founder built a 24/7 human tutoring model instead of scaling with AI What a Gates Foundation-funded study found when students had access to both AI and human tutors How much it actually costs a school to close its tutoring gap 💥 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🚀 Key Insight #1: Why Your After-School Tutoring Program Is Built to Exclude Kids What's broken: Drop-in, after-school tutoring assumes every student has a ride home, free time, and no caregiving responsibilities. The shift: Upchieve makes human tutoring available 24/7, matching a student to a live tutor in about two minutes — so support meets students wherever and whenever they actually need it, including 3am calculus. Impact: Upchieve gets over a third of students at partner schools using the platform regularly, a usage rate most after-school tutoring programs never come close to. 🚀 Key Insight #2: The Data Says Tutor the Middle, Not Just the Bottom What's broken: Most tutoring programs target only the lowest-performing 10-20% of students who are actively failing. The shift: Brookings Institute research found that once you control for academic preparation, over 70% of the college enrollment gap between low-income and high-income students disappears — meaning the biggest leverage sits with the "middle majority" of B and C students, not just the students at risk of failing. Impact: Small, consistent tutoring shifts a student's grades and, more importantly, their identity as "a student who's good at school" — which is what actually predicts whether they enroll in college. 🚀 Key Insight #3: Human Tutoring Still Beats AI Tutoring — And the Research Proves It What's broken: Schools are defaulting to AI tutoring because it looks cheaper and easier to scale than finding enough human tutors. The shift: In a Gates Foundation and Microsoft Research-funded study, less than 20% of students with access to both a human and an AI tutor ever tried the AI tutor once, and more than 92% of all tutoring sessions in the study were human-only. Impact: Students overwhelmingly chose — and stuck with — human tutors, because the motivational effect of a real person saying "I'm rooting for you" is what actually drives learning outcomes. 📣 ALY MURRAY QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "Tutoring is completely misunderstood and, in fact, undervalued as a tool that schools should be using to drive outcomes for their students." — Aly Murray "If you don't offer transportation after tutoring, you're going to lose all the kids who depend on the school bus to get home. I was one of those kids." — Aly Murray "There are enough humans to provide human tutoring to every student that needs it." — Aly Murray "When presented with a choice between an AI tutor and a human tutor, students overwhelmingly choose the human tutor." — Aly Murray "Anytime you have a one-on-one pairing of a student and a tutor and they get enough hours