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 of tutoring, it works. It improves learning outcomes. It always works."
— Aly Murray
"Things can be not fun, but still worth doing."
— Aly Murray
"How can I, as a leader, claim to care about students' upward mobility if my staff are not making a living wage?"
— Aly Murray
🚵♀️ Your Do School Different Challenge
Ready to implement? Start here:
- Tomorrow: Pull your after-school tutoring attendance numbers and identify how many of your neediest students are missing simply because of the time slot.
- This Month: Calculate what a per-session cost like Upchieve's 50 cents would run your school and compare it against your current after-school tutoring spend.
- This Semester: Pilot a 24/7 or after-hours human tutoring option for your Title 1 students and track weekly usage against your current drop-in numbers.
⏰ Episode Timestamps
- 00:00 - Why after-school tutoring quietly fails students
- 04:01 - The student story that changed Aly's approach to tutoring
- 06:04 - Aly's own path through Title 1 schools as a low-income student
- 09:49 - The Brookings data linking grades to college enrollment
- 14:06 - Why Upchieve is built exclusively for Title 1 students
- 17:34 - How 24/7 human tutoring actually works behind the scenes
- 23:55 - Human tutoring versus AI tutoring head to head
- 26:57 - The Gates Foundation study on student tutor preference
- 34:08 - Reframing the story you tell about your campus
- 37:40 - How schools partner with Upchieve and what it costs
- 42:00 - The three principles of Aly's dream school
- 48:06 - The one thing every Ruckus Maker should remember
🫶 Connect With Aly Murray
🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alymurray
👩🏻💻 Website: upchieve.org
🎙️ Listen & Subscribe
Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show.
🧔🏻♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide
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META DESCRIPTION: Aly Murray of Upchieve on why after-school tutoring fails low-income students, and the research behind 24/7 human tutoring that works.
