In 1980, a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago began separate studies that called into question the common wisdom of the education world. Working in different schools and different grades, they asked: what kind of progress might students make if they were each given highly favorable conditions in which to learn? Their proxy for such conditions was simple: skilled tutors who aided the students based on their individual needs.

“As the … results began to emerge, we were astonished,” both by the impact and the consistency of the results, wrote their professor, Benjamin Bloom. Nearly every student with the tutoring — 98 percent — out-learned a comparison class, and 90 percent reached levels of achievement that only the top 20 percent of the non-tutored students did.

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