Can Tutoring Save Us? AI, Accountability, and the Learning We Owe Students

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Rahul Kalita, Co-Founder at Tutored by Teachers; Ben Caulfield, CEO at Eedi Labs; Susanna Loeb, Professor at Stanford University; Antoinette Mitchell, State Superintendent at the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, District of Columbia; and Liz Cohen, Vice President of Policy at 50CAN and author of The Future of Tutoring.The speakers explored how tutoring had long been one of education’s most powerful—and most elusive—levers for improving student outcomes. They examined how decades of research had shown that high-quality tutoring could dramatically accelerate learning, yet at scale, that promise had repeatedly fallen short. Systems had struggled to sustain it, students had often not seen the hoped-for gains, and tutoring too often remained fragile, episodic, or disconnected from core instruction.This session focused on how AI had entered the equation not as a silver bullet, but as a forcing function. Panelists discussed how AI could diagnose faster, personalize more precisely, and deliver feedback at scale, while also making it impossible to ignore that technology alone could not fix weak instructional design or unclear accountability. In an AI-enabled world, they examined whether tutoring could finally be built in ways that truly delivered learning.The conversation explored whether AI could meaningfully strengthen tutoring or whether it simply exposed systems that were never built to last. Speakers examined the conditions that made tutoring durable, how tutoring could be better integrated with instructional systems, and what accountability should look like when the goal was not mere participation, but real and measurable gains for students. At its core, this session focused on the learning students are owed—and what it would take to finally deliver it.