As a graduate of Oxbridge, with its time-honored tutorial system, it would be difficult for me to dispute Dr. Bausell’s central premise—that one-on-one instruction is the best guarantor of improved academic performance. Of course, this would involve displacing or at least supplementing the traditional 1:35 student:teacher ratio of the conventional classroom. But Dr. Bausell’s exhaustive research summary leaves one with no other plausible conclusion.

Dr. Bausell provides a comprehensive analysis of the lessons to be drawn from classic schooling research.  Among the more salient conclusions are: 1)  that what children bring to school is vastly more important than what happens thereafter, as the Coleman Report found; 2) in examining all of the variables that impinge on student academic performance (teacher effectiveness, socio-economic advantage, appropriate evaluation criteria, etc.), none is demonstrably more significant than time spent learning“one-on-one”; and 3) that only an individualized computer program can address all these issues effectively and simultaneously.

Though the reader is left to infer that such “one-on-one” computerized instruction is equally effective for all grade levels, one wonders whether the inculcation of basic skills and the more sophisticated analysis presupposed of high school students would respond equally well to this computerized approach. Notwithstanding, “one-on-one” appears to be the only way to go if we are really serious about eliminating the so-called “achievement gap”. However, equally obviously, it is the marriage of technology to the individual tutorial which makes it all possible from an economic point of view.

http://educationnext.org/why-schools-of-one-are-our-future/